Safety Assessment of UTM Strategic Deconfliction

View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2023-0965.vid This work outlines and applies a simulation driven methodology for safety analysis of Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) systems that are likely to emerge in the upcoming years using cooperative strategic deconfliction as the primary mitigator of collision risk. It builds on past work that examined the implications of using volume based strategic deconfliction in UTM to mitigate collision risk between uncrewed aircraft using Monte Carlo methods in simulation. We apply this methodology to asses the sensitivities of the system in terms of safety relative to key performance characteristics of strategic deconfliction such as operational intent conformance rate and strategic deconfliction participation rate. Additionally, we examine the impact of key operational characteristics, such as operational density, on system safety. Furthermore, we simulate two different operational complexities - a low complexity operational profile of uniformly distributed out-and-back operations, and a high complexity operational profile of four different operational use cases - hub-and-spoke, long-linear-inspection, point-to-point, and out-and-back operations - distributed across the Denver metropolitan area according on features of the city and population density. The simulation results generated suggest that strategic deconfliction provides a significant safety benefit that is approximately constant with operational density, and applies under both the low complexity and high complexity operational profiles simulated. The simulated benefit is sensitive to participation rate, but not to the range of operational intent conformance rates simulated in this paper.