A Lane-Based Approach for Large-Scale Strategic Conflict Management for UAS Service Suppliers

This paper provides a detailed airspace capacity analysis for the Federal Aviation Administration's Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM) concept of operations. Prior work has addressed aspects of this problem under specific assumptions about individual behavior of operators (human and autonomous) and the structure of the airspace, however recent discussions held between NASA and industry stakeholders indicate that cooperation will be necessary to minimize the need for tactical collision avoidance. This problem is referred to as Strategic Conflict Management and it imposes constraints on the system that can become computationally intractable. In this paper, an airspace structure inspired by roadway roundabouts, and a computationally tractable trajectory scheduling algorithm for UAS Service Suppliers (USS) are presented to solve this problem.