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Understanding Fairness in Unmanned Traffic Management

Open Skies For All

The future of the commercial drone industry – and the advancement of many new humanitarian and enterprise applications for drone technology – rely upon the safe integration of drones into the airspace. As industry begins to dominate the conversation on drone delivery and other applications, is UTM being developed to ensure that the skies are open to everyone? In this memo, we take a deep dive into fairness in UTM systems.

Deconfliction is one of the most practical aspects of a UTM system where fairness is critical. When multiple aircraft have desired routes that are in a conflict with each other, which one gets permission to fly first, and which aircraft will have to make way?

In manned aircraft, “first-come, first-served” is a widely accepted rule for prioritization. For unmanned systems, however, a “first-requested, first-served” approach may have drawbacks in terms of fairness, because of the diversity in types of operations that may want access to the airspace. Some commercial operations like property inspections have the flexibility to plan well in advance; while other applications, like on-demand drone delivery or air taxi services, may not have this flexibility.

Many other complex areas of society have required the development of systems to ensure equity: such as the allocation of radio spectrum for wireless networks, the legislative seat assignments in the U.S. Congress, or the prioritization of patients for organ transplants. These systems may provide some lessons for the development of fairness in UTM; but they don’t provide a working model that can be readily ported to the UTM domain.

There are, however, metrics that can be used to evaluate a system for fairness. The distribution of delays and number of impacted operations across operators can be evaluated to quantify fairness using formal metrics from the academic literature. These then allow fairness to be balanced against other requirements, such as efficiency, predictability, flexibility, and safety.

Fairness is something that needs to be built into the system from the start, for important reasons. Unlike regular air traffic management systems, which are managed by a central authority, the decentralized UTM architectures proposed in some regions mean that many individual participants and stakeholders must negotiate access. If participants feel that the UTM framework is fair, they will cooperate; stakeholders who feel that the system is unfair are more likely to act to improve their own situation at the expense of others. Cooperation leads to more efficient use of resources.

Understanding Fairness in Unmanned Traffic Management

Open Skies For All

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