Energy-Efficient Trajectory and Age of Information Optimization for Urban Air Mobility

Urban air Mobility (UAM) has been conceived as a new form of transportation. UAM ultimately aims to operate unmanned, so it needs to select its trajectory and periodically send its status to the base station (BS). As an status indicator, the age of information (AoI) signifies the freshness of the information, and it is crucial for applications like real-time control systems. In this article, we address two main challenges: optimizing the UAM’s trajectory and updating the AoI between the UAM and the BS. We formulate an algorithm to maximize the energy efficiency of each UAM’s trajectory and jointly minimize the AoI cycle. As a complicated and non-convex problem, we approach proximal policy optimization (PPO) as our solution in this paper. Experiment results show that our proposed method outperformed the direct trajectory baseline in similar energy efficiency but achieved 46% increased efficiency in average AoI.