Metropolis II: Benefits of Centralised Separation Management in High-Density Urban Airspace

Abstract

The Metropolis II project aimed to study the impact of centralised separation management for urban aerial mobility. Three concepts were developed in this study: a fully centralised, strategically separated concept, a hybrid concept featuring centralised strategic separation and distributed tactical separation, and a fully distributed tactical concept. A comparative simulation study was performed, using traffic scenarios based on predicted demand in an urban airspace in the city of Vienna. Simulations were performed with varying traffic densities and situations. Results show that the purely strategic and purely tactical strategies perform comparably in terms of safety, and that further improvements can be achieved with a combination of those strategies.