A crowd-sourcing approach for forecasting UAS demand and resource utilization

A key component to solving many of the engineering challenges for integrating UAS into the National Airspace System (NAS) is being able to state within discrete airspace, the numbers of forecasted UAS by airframe type and the type of mission or operational use being performed.In general, there is not a demand forecast that is tightly coupled to the real purpose of the mission requirements (e.g. in terms the real locations of physical structures such as windmills to inspect, farms to survey, pipelines to patrol, etc.). Being able to present a solid basis for the demand is crucial to get the attention of investment, government and other fiscal planners. To this end, Mosaic ATM under a NASA guidance is preparing a crowd sourced, demand forecast engine for commercial and government organizational users to drawn upon and be able to share vetted and accurate projection data. The UAS Demand Generator for Discrete Airspace Density (UAXPAN) project creates a common solution in forecasting the growth and use of numerous unmanned systems and numerous mission types. Users of the system can produce datadriven forecasts of UA usage patterns, and use plugin application solvers to further their analysis of the results (e.g., predicting cellular communications link demand).