Consensus Based Air Transport System for Strategic Deconfliction for Urban Air Mobility 2024-26-0405

Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) envisions heterogenous airborne entities like crewed and uncrewed passenger and cargo vehicles within, and between urban and rural environment. To achieve this, a paradigm shift to a cooperative operating environment similar to Extensible Traffic Management (xTM) is needed. This requires the blending of Traditional Air Traffic Services (ATS) with the new generation AAM vehicles having their unique flight dynamics and handling characteristics. A hybrid environment needs to be established with enhanced shared situational awareness for all stakeholders, enabling equitable airspace access, minimizing risk, optimized airspace use, and providing flexible and adaptable airspace rules. This paper introduces a novel concept of distributed airspace management which would be apt for all kinds of operational scenarios perceived for AAM. The proposal is centered around the efficiency and safety in air space management being achieved by self-discipline. It utilizes Blockchain’s core concepts like Distributed Ledger, Consensus, and Immutable Smart Contracts. The concept blends harmoniously to the CONOPS recently published by FAA, though the degrees of involvement by various actors of the eco system are primed for the very adaptation soon when “self-aware” aircraft are expected to dominate the urban skies. Strategic deconfliction and cooperative management are effectively realized with distribution of airspace knowledge, participative decision making and mutual trust. The concept is scalable to the foretold autonomy in this area. Trend predictors extrapolate a massive increase in dynamics, interactions and decision making as the flying vehicles count occupying a city's airspace, is set for exponential growth with personally owned flying vehicles. Proposed solution would operate efficiently with current computing technologies and can be scaled to be resident onboard or offboard the vehicle.