Fleet and Vertiport Sizing for an Urban Air Mobility Commuting Service

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, the authors implement a bilevel rolling window fleet scheduling formulation that includes vertiport area as a secondary objective. The authors 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, the authors 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. The authors 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.

• Record URL:
  https://doi.org/10.1177/03611981231216977
• Availability:
  • Find a library where document is available. Order URL: http://worldcat.org/issn/03611981
• Supplemental Notes:
  • Mark T. Kotwicz Herniczek https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1694-4853© National Academy of Sciences: Transportation Research Board 2024.
• Authors:
  • Kotwicz Herniczek, Mark T
  • 0000-0002-1694-4853
  • German, Brian J
  • 0000-0003-4448-0029
  • Preis, Lukas
  • 0000-0002-2610-7661
• Publication Date: 2024

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Web
• Features: References;
• Serial:
  • Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board
  • Publisher: Sage Publications, Incorporated
  • ISSN: 0361-1981
  • EISSN: 2169-4052
  • Serial URL: http://journals.sagepub.com/home/trr

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Air taxi service; Commuter aircraft; Urban areas; V/STOL airports; Vehicle fleets
• Subject Areas: Aviation; Operations and Traffic Management; Passenger Transportation; Terminals and Facilities;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01905348
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS, TRB
• Created Date: Jan 23 2024 9:13AM