A Method for Air Route Network Planning of Urban Air Mobility

Urban air mobility is an effective solution to address the current issue of ground traffic congestion in future cities. However, as the user scale continues to expand, the current civil aviation flight scheduling and control methods are becoming inadequate to meet the high-volume flight guarantee demands of future urban air transportation. In order to effectively handle and resolve potential issues in this field in the future, this paper proposes a method for planning urban air mobility route networks. The planning process is divided into two stages: construction and optimization. Methods for constructing urban air mobility route networks based on flight routes and global optimization methods based on node movement are proposed in each stage. In the construction stage, a complete construction process is designed to generate routes based on existing flight routes, in line with the trend of urban air transportation development. In the optimization stage, inspired by the ant colony algorithm, node transfer rules and information transfer rules are incorporated to design a global optimization process and algorithm for route networks. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and advancement of the proposed planning method.