Graph Learning-based Fleet Scheduling for Urban Air Mobility under Operational Constraints, Varying Demand & Uncertainties

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Paul, Steve, Witter, Jhoel, Chowdhury, Souma
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Paul, Steve
Witter, Jhoel
Chowdhury, Souma
author_facet Paul, Steve
Witter, Jhoel
Chowdhury, Souma
contents This paper develops a graph reinforcement learning approach to online planning of the schedule and destinations of electric aircraft that comprise an urban air mobility (UAM) fleet operating across multiple vertiports. This fleet scheduling problem is formulated to consider time-varying demand, constraints related to vertiport capacity, aircraft capacity and airspace safety guidelines, uncertainties related to take-off delay, weather-induced route closures, and unanticipated aircraft downtime. Collectively, such a formulation presents greater complexity, and potentially increased realism, than in existing UAM fleet planning implementations. To address these complexities, a new policy architecture is constructed, primary components of which include: graph capsule conv-nets for encoding vertiport and aircraft-fleet states both abstracted as graphs; transformer layers encoding time series information on demand and passenger fare; and a Multi-head Attention-based decoder that uses the encoded information to compute the probability of selecting each available destination for an aircraft. Trained with Proximal Policy Optimization, this policy architecture shows significantly better performance in terms of daily averaged profits on unseen test scenarios involving 8 vertiports and 40 aircraft, when compared to a random baseline and genetic algorithm-derived optimal solutions, while being nearly 1000 times faster in execution than the latter.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_04851
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Graph Learning-based Fleet Scheduling for Urban Air Mobility under Operational Constraints, Varying Demand & Uncertainties
Paul, Steve
Witter, Jhoel
Chowdhury, Souma
Multiagent Systems
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
This paper develops a graph reinforcement learning approach to online planning of the schedule and destinations of electric aircraft that comprise an urban air mobility (UAM) fleet operating across multiple vertiports. This fleet scheduling problem is formulated to consider time-varying demand, constraints related to vertiport capacity, aircraft capacity and airspace safety guidelines, uncertainties related to take-off delay, weather-induced route closures, and unanticipated aircraft downtime. Collectively, such a formulation presents greater complexity, and potentially increased realism, than in existing UAM fleet planning implementations. To address these complexities, a new policy architecture is constructed, primary components of which include: graph capsule conv-nets for encoding vertiport and aircraft-fleet states both abstracted as graphs; transformer layers encoding time series information on demand and passenger fare; and a Multi-head Attention-based decoder that uses the encoded information to compute the probability of selecting each available destination for an aircraft. Trained with Proximal Policy Optimization, this policy architecture shows significantly better performance in terms of daily averaged profits on unseen test scenarios involving 8 vertiports and 40 aircraft, when compared to a random baseline and genetic algorithm-derived optimal solutions, while being nearly 1000 times faster in execution than the latter.
title Graph Learning-based Fleet Scheduling for Urban Air Mobility under Operational Constraints, Varying Demand & Uncertainties
topic Multiagent Systems
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.04851