Simulation-based Assessment of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Traffic Congestion in Metropolitan Area

Abstract

The public and commercial demand of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) keeps increasing rapidly in recent years. Especially, UAVs in urban area are expected to play an important role in various fields such as transport and emergency response. However, the risk of flying in highly urbanized cities is very high due to large demand, high-rise buildings and centralized infrastructure. This study investigates how large UAV demand will form congestions in urban airspace without any traffic rules for UAVs. We use Gangnam area in Seoul metropolitan city for the simulation and identify traffic congestion by using grid cells. As a result, we observe a few stationary and temporary bottlenecks at specific areas and they imply the need for traffic management system for UAVs.

The public and commercial demand of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) is growing exponentially in near future. Though there are enormous potential of UAV usage in urban areas from parcel delivery to emergency response, they pose inevitable risk to city population and infrastructures. This study examines how large UAV demand will affect the urban airspace when there is no infrastructure system or traffic rules in place for UAVs. We identify congestion locations by dividing the airspace into the three dimensional grids. Highly urbanized area of Gangnam in Seoul metropolitan city is chosen for the study area. For the result, we observe a few persistent and temporary congestion bottlenecks at specific areas, which implies the need of operational procedures and flow planning strategies to manage this new air traffic in a safe and efficient manner.