Unmanned air traffic network design concepts

This paper introduces the concept of network design for an Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) system. First, data-driven air traffic modelling and analysis is used to define feasible low-level urban airspace regions suitable to embed the network. Second, a modified k-centres approach is used to define candidate network node locations by considering the geographical coverage of typical unmanned aircraft operations expected in urban areas. Third, k-nearest neighbours and graph theory concepts are used to define an Unmanned Traffic Network (UTN) structure that attempts to maximise coverage without impacting existing manned air traffic operations. The approach is applied to Brisbane, Australia and is the first known attempt to realistically model the spatial structure of an Unmanned Traffic Network.