Handling demand-capacity imbalances in aerial vehicle traffic

It is expected that the number of drones used in both commercial and leisure operations will grow significantly in the coming years, which raises the need for a solid framework for management of this traffic. Unmanned traffic management (UTM) is a system for handling autonomous drone flights over urban areas. This thesis addresses the central questions in UTM: how much traffic is sustainable in a city scenario and what are the possible ways of managing the flights. We consider both horizontal-maneuver collision avoidance and vertical deconfliction strategies, including risk management solutions inspired by performance-based navigation (PBN) - a unifying theme for ongoing airspace modernization efforts (we also consider traffic management for the conventional, manned aviation). We use mathematical modeling and conduct numerical simulations to obtain capacity estimations for a geographical area and present algorithms for airspace management. To our knowledge this is the first thesis on UTM, and several directions for future research are also identified