Geovectoring: Reducing Traffic Complexity to Increase the Capacity of UAV airspace

Both U-space in Europe, as well as UTM in the USA, develop concepts and tools for UAV airspace. Enabling highdensity operations is one of the goals of these studies. Past and recent studies have analysed which factors affect the capacity of a UAV airspace. An improved understanding of this can lead to control methods for capacity management. Two general principles for capacity management can be distinguished: controlling the traffic density, and controlling the traffic complexity. The first approach can be achieved using geofencing or geocaging, which is foreseen for UAV airspace. The second approach is hardly addressed in the planned concepts. In this paper a new, general concept, called geovectoring, is proposed which could increase the capacity by reducing the traffic complexity for U-Space and UTM. This paper therefore proposes to add geovectoring as a third service to the already planned concepts of geofencing and geocaging.