LAAT-Flow Project
Low-Altitude Air city Transport Flow Project
Modeling, Control, and Simulation for Air Mobility
Our vision: Controlling flows of aircraft traffic, rather than individual aircraft
The LAAT-Flow Project focuses on Modeling, Control, and Simulation for LAAT systems.
In recent years, the development of a new mode of urban air transport, the low-altitude passenger and delivery aircraft, emerges from the advancement of aviation and communication technologies. This advances the concept of urban air mobility (UAM), leading to the invention of new urban air transport systems, namely low-altitude air city transport (LAAT). Such systems will include aircraft operated with or without pilots, transferring passengers and goods in urban areas using low-altitude levels of urban airspace.
Mission of the LAAT-Flow Project
Many questions can be raised from the upcoming system, the existing traffic modeling and management strategies do not provide answers to the two core questions:
(Q1) “How can traffic flow theory be developed to capture collective aircraft flow characteristics, interactions in aircraft flows, and patterns of the new urban LAAT systems?”
(Q2) “How can traffic feedback control schemes be developed in the era of LAAT systems?”
Novel aggregated modeling and air traffic feedback boundary control paradigms are needed.
Objective of the LAAT-Flow Project
(1) to establish vehicular ground traffic flow characteristics and concepts for LAAT aircraft flow;
(2) to develop realistic control-oriented dynamical models, which mimic traffic flow dynamics of LAAT aircraft, with various types of time delay as key elements for specific problems of LAAT control;
(3) to propose original adaptive feedback control strategies for LAAT systems with guaranteed robustness against uncertainties both from (i) physical urban airspace infrastructure and (ii) network control realization, under (iii) time delays (constant, time-varying and state-dependent) in control and signal transformation channels;
(4) to demonstrate controlled LAAT systems performance via simulation tools and lab experiments.
LAAT-Flow Project Methodology
Modelling
air traffic flow
Developing
aggregate aircraft traffic flow models
Designing
feedback control strategies
Simulating
the models and the control policies
Haddad, J., Mirkin, B. and Assor, K., 2021. Traffic flow modeling and feedback control for future Low-Altitude Air city Transport: An MFD-based approach. Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, 133, p.103380. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trc.2021.103380.
Safadi, Y., Fu, R., Quan, Q. and Haddad, J., 2023. Macroscopic fundamental diagrams for low-altitude air city transport. Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, 152, p.104141. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trc.2023.104141.