Scalable U-Space Authorization Workflow enabling Fairness and Capacity Management

To support the expected increase in drone traffic, the next phases of U-space deployment must be able to dynamically manage capacity-demand imbalances, and fairness issues in airspace access. This article discusses how these processes may be constrained by the First-Come-First-Served authorization process mandated by regulation. Alternatively, it proposes an authorization workflow that defers in time the authorization decision and provides until then a probabilistic view of the authorization result. In addition, it proposes to implement a flight prioritization system using different priority queues whose access is indirectly controlled by a new U-space service: the fairness management service. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism is able to reduce the flight submission order impact into the final authorization success rate.