Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is a transformative concept that must operate harmoniously within the constraints imposed by societal impacts. Noise-aware flight trajectory planning can address UAM’s community noise concerns. However, the traditional trajectory optimization paradigm requires repetitive computations of a flight’s noise footprints in complex urban environments and is computationally expensive. In this work, we propose virtual acoustic terrain, a novel concept to enable an efficient trajectory optimization paradigm. By applying acoustic ray tracing and the principle of reciprocity in a complex urban environment, we convert different noise constraints into 3D exclusion zones which UAM operations should avoid to maintain limited noise impact. It combines with the physical urban terrain to define an acceptable fly zone for non-repetitive noise-aware trajectory optimization. This framework provides a new angle to future urban area airspace management and can also accommodate other forms of societal constraints.

城市空中交通 (UAM) 是一个变革性概念，必须在社会影响施加的限制内和谐运作。噪声感知飞行轨迹规划可以解决 UAM 的社区噪声问题。然而，传统的轨迹优化范式需要在复杂的城市环境中重复计算航班的噪声足迹，并且计算量大。在这项工作中，我们提出了虚拟声学地形，这是一个能够实现高效轨迹优化范例的新概念。通过在复杂的城市环境中应用声射线追踪和互易原理，我们将不同的噪声约束转换为 3D 禁区，UAM 操作应避免这些区域以保持有限的噪声影响。它与物理城市地形相结合，为非重复噪声感知轨迹优化定义了一个可接受的飞行区域。该框架为未来的市区空域管理提供了一个新的视角，也可以适应其他形式的社会约束。