An ASP-based Approach to UAM Strategic Deconfliction: preliminary results

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) promises to revolutionize transportation in metropolitan areas by introducing “air taxis” for passenger and cargo transport. However, the envisioned dense operations of UAM vehicles in lowaltitude airspace pose unprecedented challenges for air traffic management (ATM). The Strategic Deconfliction (SD) problem in UAM is about designing the pre-flight “air traffic plan” for potentially hundreds or thousands of simultaneous urban flights, allocating routes, times, and resources in a way that guarantees separation and operational feasibility before any aircraft even leaves the ground. This short paper presents an approach based on Answer Set Programming (ASP) to solve the SD problem in UAM and reports preliminary results on a use case. In particular, the modelling choices will be described with regard to the air network topology, the fleet of drones to be scheduled and the SD problem