As part of the K-UAM Grand Challenge, we teamed with some fantastic partners as part of a Consortium. We put together an Urban Air Traffic Management Solution (UATM) with core services deployed as part of this solution. This blog post series will cover these core services. In this post, we’ll discuss building out the airspace information layers. In follow-on posts, we’ll look at integrating surveillance feeds into the system and utilizing surveillance data. We’ll talk about flight authorization and the rules engine. Then we’ll move to strategic deconfliction and conformance monitoring. And finally, we’ll discuss how this works in a federated architecture where a UATM system can manage operations from multiple operators and PSUs.
UAS Traffic Management System
Over the years of building our UAS Traffic Management (UTM) system, we have architected it modularly so that our individual UTM services can be applied in several workflow configurations and form factors. We offer a core traffic management platform that allows us to work directly with operators, providing them with solutions to gain access to the airspace.
For Korea, we’ve deployed a UATM system with a lot of core services, including information exchange, airspace procedure and design, airspace management, flow management, and conformance monitoring. These key services enable the PSU to create operations, get those operations approved, and get feedback such as conformance and separation management during operations.
Situational Awareness and Decision Support
Let’s talk about these services and how they come together to provide situational awareness and decisional support. We’ll start with building an intelligent 4D environment from the ground up. In our UATM system, we begin by modeling the digital airspace and geospatial base layers, and we call that UAM aeronautical information management (AIM).
Building Airspace Information Layers - From the Ground Up
First, let’s talk about the data sets. It’s always very important to load in your static and dynamic airspace information. This information might include your danger areas, restricted areas, military operation areas, and just general special-use airspace. With the OneSky UATM, you can also stream in 3-dimensional data, including terrain and building data. This technology comes from our sister company, Cesium, which makes geospatial visualizations for the web. They provide the ability to process massive geospatial datasets, such as terrain and building data, and stream that into our dynamic environment. This forms the geospatial base layers of our systems. This provides a common altitude reference system so that everything speaks the same altitude reference “language” when exchanging operations and altitude information.
Static and Dynamic Airspace Constraints
But the OneSky UTM is not just about visualization of the airspace environment. Every single airspace, obstacle, or geometry can be treated as a constraint in our system. You can dive into each constraint, look at the authorization category (No-fly, Authorization, Awareness), how it’s classified by type (Controlled Airspace, Special Use, Restricted, etc.), effective time intervals, altitudes, and ownership. You can make edits if you have sufficient airspace administrator permissions. You can also create new constraints, such as Temporary Flight Restrictions (TFRs), by setting the date, time, and min and max altitudes. This immediately becomes an effective constraint in the system used during the flight authorization process and real-time airspace awareness service.
Static airspace data is not the only data that is handled in the OneSky UTM. Dynamic data such as weather, dynamic infrastructure, or ship tracking data can be ingested and utilized as a constraint.
Once our airspace information layers are built up, we can move on to surveillance integration. In the next post in this series, we’ll discuss how the OneSky UTM utilizes surveillance feeds and how flight authorizations and the rules engine can be used.
Meet the Team In Korea
The OneSky team is heading to Korea in July! We will be doing a roadshow to discuss further how our UATM solution is part of Korea's advanced air mobility efforts. If you would like to meet with the team, let us know: https://www.onesky.xyz/contact.