04/2025: Our paper “An Evaluation of UTM ConOps for Drone Deliveries: From Pre-Planned Air Corridors to Dynamic 4D Trajectories” has been accepted by ATRD Symposium 2025
Highlights
1 Developed and evaluated three UTM Concepts of Operations (ConOps A/B/C) for urban drone deliveries with varying airspace structures.
2 Established a multi-metric evaluation framework covering safety, business, operational efficiency, and system performance.
3 Simulated ConOps in diverse drone delivery scenarios across dense (Hong Kong) and sparse (Netherlands) urban environments using real-world geographic data.
4 Identified trade-offs among safety, flexibility, and computational demand to inform future urban airspace management strategies.
Abstract
Efficient Unmanned Aircraft System Traffic Management (UTM) is crucial for scaling low-altitude logistic and transportation operations. This research evaluates three UTM Concepts of Operations (ConOps) with varying airspace organization: ConOps A uses non-overlapping air corridors, ConOps B allows intersecting air corridors, and ConOps C enables free flights with dynamic 4D trajectory management.
A simulation-based assessment framework examined these ConOps across different scenarios, evaluating metrics related to safety, business operations, flight logistics, and UTM system factors. The simulations covered various urban environments and delivery patterns, from high-rise dense areas to sparse low-rise regions, including hub-to-multiple-destinations and hub-to-hub movements. Results show that ConOps A achieves highest safety but lowest efficiency and flexibility. ConOps C provides maximum efficiency and adaptability but requires substantial computational resources and faces increased safety challenges with higher traffic volumes. ConOps B demonstrates balanced performance. These findings provide insights for implementing UTM ConOps in urban drone delivery applications.
Lishuai Li 