Urban Air Mobility: Factors Affecting Vertiport Capacity

This study aims at analyzing critical factors impacting vertiport capacity in urban areas. Urban Air Mobility (UAM) or Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) is a concept transportation mode being designed for intracity transport of passengers and cargo utilizing autonomous electric vehicles capable of Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) from dense and congested areas. The vertiports are expected to be placed on rooftops in Central Business Districts (CBD), limiting vertiports' size and suggesting high infrastructure costs. Therefore, vertiport capacity analysis is critical for an efficient UAM network as operations could be tailored for maximum efficiency. This analysis uses the vertiport designs developed for a previous study using current guidelines for heliports by Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The minimum area of all designs was estimated for single and dual taxi-lanes configurations.From a preliminary geospatial analysis of San Francisco CBD, the rooftops' sizes are less likely to accommodate vertiports with more than three landing pads, even with tailored modifications. Therefore, this capacity analysis only considers vertiports with 1, 2, and 3 landing pads. A Discrete Event Simulation (DES) model is developed in MATLAB to simulate UAM operations and determine vertiport capacity. A high-demand vertiport in San Francisco Financial District is selected to understand the impact of unidirectional flows on a vertiport’s passenger serving capacity. The analysis focuses on the utilization of various elements of vertiport, as they comprise the overall efficiency of the vertiport operations. Moreover, vertiport capacity sensitivity against elements such as the charging rate, service times at landing pads, and parking stalls are included in the findings.