A Multilayer Low-Altitude Airspace Model for UAV Traffic Management

Over the recent years, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles' (UAVs) technology developed rapidly, in turn shedding light on a wide range of potential civil and commercial applications ranging from mapping and surveillance, parcel delivery to more demanding ones that require UAVs to operate in heterogeneous swarms. UAVs are thus expected to soon dominate the shared, low-altitude airspace over populated cities, introducing multiple new research challenges in safely managing the unprecedented traffic demands. The main contribution of this work is addressing the complex problem of UAV traffic management at an abstract level by proposing a structure for the uncontrolled low-altitude airspace. The paper proposes a model of the airspace as a weighted multilayer network of nodes and airways and presents a set of experimental simulations of UAV traffic for the validation of the model.