Roadmap for the Establishment of an Innovative Air Mobility Control Center Research Lab

Kurzfassung

Innovative Air Mobility based on novel vertical-take-off-and-landing aircraft promises to reshape urban and regional transport, yet its safe, large-scale integration into European airspace requires a fundamentally new traffic-management paradigm. This paper presents the initial roadmap for the Innovative Air Mobility Control Center laboratory, to be installed at German Aerospace Center. The laboratory architecture combines a web-based fleet control station, a vertiport management module, and a suite of back-end services (e.g. scenario simulation, flight planning, conflict detection, and U-space interfacing) that together emulate a full-scale U-space ecosystem. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations of innovative air mobility system layouts under nominal, disturbed, and disrupted conditions will be enabled by the research laboratory. The laboratory supports hardware-in-the-loop, potentially mixed-reality simulations (e.g. for air taxi cabin simulation) and integrates with U-space actors for uncrewed traffic management. By systematically scaling from a single-vertiport baseline to multi-vertiport and air traffic control integrated scenarios, the platform addresses four core research questions: (i) scalability of cargo and passenger air mobility scenarios; (ii) evolution of operator roles and workload under increasing autonomy; (iii) operational benefits of advanced U-space services; and (iv) impact of routing strategies (corridor, free-flow, hybrid) on system performance. The presented roadmap thus provides a reproducible, interoperable testbed for evaluating technical, operational, and human-factor aspects essential to the deployment of safe, scalable innovative air mobility services in Europe.