A Data Analysis Approach for Simulations of Urban Air Mobility Operations

For the Urban Air Mobility (UAM) industry, NASA has defined a series of UAM Maturity Levels (UML) corresponding to increasingly more complex and operationally dense UAM operations. In support of the gradual progression towards higher UML levels, NASA is currently conducting a set of UAM air traffic simulations—collectively referred to as X4. This paper describes a set of system effectiveness measures, and their associated metrics, for data analysis of X4 simulations. The descriptions, rationales, and calculation procedures for two metrics to be used in data analysis of simulation results, the number of predicted demand-capacity imbalances and the pre-departure delays, are described. Results from data analysis of one set of simulation runs are presented to demonstrate how these metrics support the assessment of performance of the system architecture for X4 simulations and the verification of experiment requirements.