Enhancing Urban Air Mobility Scheduling Through Declarative Reasoning and Stakeholder Modeling

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to optimize mission schedules for vertical airports (vertiports in short) to satisfy the different needs of stakeholders. We model the problem as a resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) to obtain the best resource allocation and schedule. As a new approach to solving the RCPSP, we propose answer set programming (ASP). This is in contrast to the existing research using MILP as a solution to the RCPSP. Our approach can take complex scheduling restrictions and stakeholder-specific requirements. In addition, we formalize and include stakeholder needs using a knowledge representation and reasoning framework. Our experiments show that the proposed method can generate practical schedules that reflect what stakeholders actually need. In particular, we show that our approach can compute optimal schedules more efficiently and flexibly than previous approaches. We believe that this approach is suitable for the dynamic and complex environments of vertiports.