Integrated U-space societal acceptance assessment: energy-based and perception-based acoustic metrics.

Ramos-Romero, Carlos; Lotinga, Michael J B; Torija, Antonio J

Abstract

Innovative Air Mobility (IAM) systems are progressing within the European U-space framework to promote efficient and environmentally friendly air transport. The ImAFUSA project contributes by developing an integrated U-space assessment tool to evaluate environmental, societal, and safety impacts. This paper focuses on acoustic metrics for assessing environmental noise and annoyance caused by unmanned aerial systems (UAS). It explores both energy-based and perception-based indicators to evaluate UAS noise. These metrics allow the U-space noise assessment accounting for the interaction between UAS and existing soundscapes and number of events. The IAM noise assessment tool utilises acoustic pressure time-series at listener positions, which can be generated from measurements or auralised signals. In the latter case, the integration of aircraft noise synthesis, flight-control data, and sound propagation along the flight path is potentially feasible as input for the assessment tool. This flexibility highlights the usability of the proposed metrics across diverse input types, laying the groundwork for future extensions that incorporate a broader range of data, including varied operating conditions and advanced pre-dictive models. Therefore, the calculated metrics would provide insight-ful estimations for the societal and capacity impact of U-space, potentially contributing to the strategic noise management of the UAM operations.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: Forumacusticum Euronoise 2025
• Start Date: Jun 23, 2025
• End Date: Jun 26, 2025
• Acceptance Date: Jun 23, 2025
• Publication Date: 2025-06
• Deposit Date: Jul 7, 2025
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 10, 2025
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Keywords: U-space; environmental noise; urban air mo- bility; noise annoyance; psychoacoustics