Evaluation of UTM Strategic Deconfliction Through End-to-End Simulation

This paper provides an initial analysis of the ability of volume based deconfliction to mitigate air risk between cooperative unmanned operations in an Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) setting. Namely, we use high-fidelity simulation in combination with a collection of UTM services to evaluate the functional and performance requirements for strategic deconfliction that are emerging from the standards work in UTM. Our objective is to assess how well the requirements developed by standards groups can support end-to-end safety. We consider two key aspects of strategic deconfliction within our evaluation: how operational volumes are constructed and how well unmanned vehicles are able to conform to their planned operational volumes in the presence of system error. To that end, we outline an end-to-end simulation framework that can be used to evaluate system level implications of UTM requirements. We apply the framework to (1) provide quantitative guidance for the risk reduction associated with strategic deconfliction in UTM, and to (2) provide operational recommendations that would enable operators to meet safety targets prescribed by conformance rate and strategic deconfliction requirements in the UTM ecosystem.