An understanding of fleet size and vertiport size sensitivity to demand and operational parameters is necessary to quantify the scalability of urban air mobility (UAM) services. In this work, we implement a bilevel rolling window fleet scheduling formulation that includes vertiport area as a secondary objective. We also present a simple vertiport area estimation methodology that leverages the fleet scheduling results and provides a lower bound on vertiport infrastructure area requirements. Lastly, we explore the sensitivity of fleet size and vertiport infrastructure requirements to several vehicle and operational parameters, including geographical demand distribution, daily passenger volume, vehicle passenger capacity, passenger aggregation window, battery charge rate, pad separation, and pad size. We find that, although the fleet size is reasonable for a UAM commuting service scaled to serve 10,000 passengers per day, vertiport area requirements are likely problematic under current sizing guidance from the Federal Aviation Administration, particularly area requirements for vertiports that serve as workplace hubs located in dense urban centers.
Fleet and Vertiport Sizing for an Urban Air Mobility Commuting Service
Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board
Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board ; 2678 , 8 ; 443-469
2024-01-01
Article (Journal)
Electronic Resource
English
Scalable Combinatorial Vertiport Placement Method for an Urban Air Mobility Commuting Service
Transportation Research Record | 2024
|Urban Air Mobility: Factors Affecting Vertiport Capacity
IEEE | 2021
|eVTOL Fleet Selection Method for Vertiport Networks
IEEE | 2021
|Vertiport navigation requirements and multisensor architecture considerations for urban air mobility
Springer Verlag | 2024
|