Real-time Traffic Simulation and Management for Large-scale Urban Air Mobility: Integrating Route Guidance and Collision Avoidance

Given the spatial heterogeneity of land use patterns in most cities, large-scale UAM deployments will likely focus on specific areas, such as intertransfer traffic between suburbs and city centers. However, large-scale UAM operations connecting multiple origin-destination pairs raise concerns about air traffic safety and efficiency due to potential conflict movements, particularly at major conflict points analogous to roadway junctions. To meet the safety and efficiency requirements of future UAM operations, this work proposes an air traffic management framework that integrates route guidance and collision avoidance. The route guidance mechanism optimizes aircraft distribution across both spatial and temporal dimensions by regulating their paths (composed of waypoints). Given the optimized paths, the collision avoidance algorithm generates collision-free aircraft trajectories between waypoints in the 3D space. To enable large-scale applications, we develop fast approximation methods for centralized path planning and adopt the velocity obstacle model for distributed collision avoidance. To our knowledge, this work is one of the first to integrate route guidance and collision avoidance for UAM. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed framework enables efficient and flexible UAM operations, including air traffic assignment, local congestion mitigation, and dynamic no-fly zone management. Compared with a collision-free baseline strategy, the proposed framework achieves considerable improvements in traffic safety and efficiency, with increases in the average minimum separation (+98.2%), the average travel speed (+70.2%), and the trip completion rate (+130%), along with a reduction in the energy consumption (-23.0%). The proposed framework demonstrates its potential for real-time traffic simulation and management in large-scale UAM systems.