A High-Performance Computing Process for Urban Air Mobility Simulations

Commercial aviation is statically proven to be the safest mode of commercial transportation. This feat is largely due to technological advances and stringent regulations that yield an under-utilized national airspace. However, as the air transportation system (ATS) evolves to support a new class of vehicles, known as urban air mobility (UAM) systems, airspace utilization will increase and a new set of safety requirements will be needed to sustain, or preferably improve, ATS’ safety record. This paper addresses this safety challenge with a novel process for developing and testing safety standards. It outlines and demonstrates a high-performance computing (HPC) process for large-scale high-fidelity UAM simulations. The developed HPC process incorporates automated air traffic control (ATC) services, which have been proposed in the unmanned traffic management (UTM) system. In addition to outlining a process for gathering UAM performance and safety data, this paper more generally contributes a novel blueprint for performing high-fidelity simulations of a large set of autonomous UAM systems that concurrently fly in an urban environment.