Urban Air Mobility (UAM) offers a solution to current traffic congestion by providing on-demand air mobility in urban areas. Effective traffic management is crucial for efficient operation of UAM systems, especially for high-demand scenarios. In this paper, we present a centralized traffic management framework for on-demand UAM systems. Specifically, we provide a scheduling policy, called VertiSync, which schedules the aircraft for either servicing trip requests or rebalancing in the system subject to aircraft safety margins and energy requirements. We characterize the system-level throughput of VertiSync, which determines the demand threshold at which passenger waiting times transition from being stabilized to being increasing over time. We show that the proposed policy is able to maximize throughput for sufficiently large fleet sizes. We demonstrate the performance of VertiSync through a case study for the city of Los Angeles, and show that it significantly reduces passenger waiting times compared to a first-come first-serve scheduling policy.

翻译：城市空中出行（UAM）通过在城市区域提供按需空中交通，为当前交通拥堵问题提供了解决方案。有效的交通管理对于UAM系统的高效运行至关重要，尤其是在高需求场景下。本文提出了一种面向按需UAM系统的集中式交通管理框架。具体而言，我们提出了一种名为"VertiSync"的调度策略，该策略在考虑飞行器安全余量和能量需求的前提下，将飞行器调度用于处理出行请求或系统内的再平衡操作。我们刻画了VertiSync的系统级吞吐量特征，该特征决定了乘客等待时间从稳定状态转变为随时间增长的需求阈值。研究表明，当机队规模足够大时，所提策略能够实现吞吐量最大化。通过以洛杉矶市为案例的实证研究，我们验证了VertiSync的性能，结果表明相较于先到先服务调度策略，该策略能显著降低乘客等待时间。