Secure Coordination for Vertiport Sequencing in Advanced Air Mobility

2026-05-20

AI Summary

This study addresses scheduling safety challenges in advanced air mobility arising from aircraft misreporting arrival times—whether due to selfish strategic behavior or malicious deception—at vertiports. To mitigate these risks under perception uncertainty, the work integrates self-reported Remote ID with external surveillance data to develop a robust scheduling mechanism. It innovatively unifies the modeling of selfish strategic misreports and adversarial perturbations, and designs a robust sequencing rule over an uncertainty set defined by surveillance-consistent constraints. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach effectively preserves schedule feasibility, safety, and fairness in representative vertiport scenarios, significantly enhancing system robustness against both deceptive reporting and sensing uncertainties.

Abstract

Advanced air mobility operations will require reliable coordination mechanisms for managing dense traffic near vertiports. However, sequencing decisions may become vulnerable when they rely on potentially falsified self-reported information such as estimated time of arrival. Self-interested vehicles may misreport their arrival times to obtain favorable landing priority, while malicious actors may spoof information to disrupt sequencing decisions or induce unnecessary congestion. This paper studies secure coordination for vertiport sequencing under sensing uncertainty. We consider a coordinator that combines self-reported Remote-ID information with externally obtained surveillance measurements to check reports and assign separation-feasible arrival schedules. Since surveillance-based estimates are uncertain, falsified reports may remain consistent with the sensing uncertainty region and cannot always be rejected outright. We therefore formulate sequencing as a robust design problem over this uncertainty region. Self-interested misreporting is modeled as a strategic deviation that improves the reporting vehicle's own sequencing outcome, whereas malicious spoofing is modeled as an adversarial disturbance that degrades the system-level objective. The final paper will develop robust sequencing rules over surveillance-consistent uncertainty sets and evaluate their performance in representative vertiport sequencing scenarios.

Problem

• secure coordination
• vertiport sequencing
• Advanced Air Mobility
• self-reported information
• sensing uncertainty

Innovation

• secure coordination
• robust sequencing
• sensing uncertainty
• Remote-ID
• adversarial spoofing