A Mean-Field Approach for Safe Routing of Multi-Destination Urban Air Mobility Networks
TL;DR
It is demonstrated that under specific underloaded conditions, a system initialized without queues will remain queue-free indefinitely, which allows us to transform a complex, infinite-dimensional continuous-time optimal control problem into a tractable, finite-dimensional algebraic optimization.
Abstract
As Urban Air Mobility (UAM) systems scale toward high-density operations, managing autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) traffic requires control frameworks that are both tractable and safety-critical. This paper presents a principled optimal control-theoretic foundation for routing in multi-destination UAM networks subject to vertiport capacity and flow constraints. We first model the network as a destination-conditioned Continuous-Time Markov Chain (CTMC) to capture the stochastic transitions between queueing, service, and flight states. To ensure tractability, we employ a mean-field fluid approximation and derive the underlying system dynamics as a set of coupled ordinary differential equations. A key contribution of this work is the formal proof of the positive invariance of the queue-free state space. We demonstrate that under specific underloaded conditions, a system initialized without queues will remain queue-free indefinitely. This result allows us to transform a complex, infinite-dimensional continuous-time optimal control problem into a tractable, finite-dimensional algebraic optimization. The resulting framework jointly optimizes for travel time and multi-hop efficiency while ensuring network-wide stability. We validate the approach by characterizing the steady-state flow equilibria and providing sufficient conditions for safe, congestion-free operation in large-scale mobility systems.