Benchmark Problem for Autonomous Urban Air Mobility

Abstract

This paper introduces a Community Benchmark Problem (CBP) for Intelligent Contingency Management (ICM) for Urban Air Mobility (UAM) aircraft. The CBP aims to provide a common framework for measuring and comparing the progress of autonomy solutions for UAM aircraft in handling emergency situations. The paper proposes a methodology for defining and quantifying five measures of complexity that capture the challenges and requirements of ICM for UAM: Mission, Environmental, Autonomy, Decision-Making, and Mission Fault. In addition, it proposes a methodology for defining and quantifying mission risk acceptability with the same goals: Contingency Management, Mission Success, Operational, Mission Redefinition, and Environmental. We describe how to use these measures to track progress of the development of ICM capability, as well as to create scenarios and evaluate the performance of different autonomy solutions.