Hierarchical Vertiport Network Design for On-Demand Multi-modal Urban Air Mobility

The vertiports that connect ground and air transportation modes play a critical role in enabling Urban Air Mobility (UAM). Parameters like aircraft occupancy and vertiport operational capacity, along with the ground traffic congestion near vertiports have dominant impacts on the vertiport network design and consequently on the total addressable market and value proposition of UAM. We propose a hierarchical method to design a vertiport network for multi-modal UAM with multiple-seat aircraft based on the passenger demand. Our objective is to determine vertiport locations and assign passengers to maximize their travel time benefit from using multi-modal UAM. The proposed hierarchical vertiport network design method consists of two steps: (1) The origins and the destinations of the UAM passengers are clustered by the k-median algorithm, which divides the whole metro region into fully-connected main sectors; (2) The passengers in the main sectors are subdivided into groups whose centers serve as the vertiports. The passenger consolidation time and vertiport operational capacity are constrained in these two steps. We implement the proposed method in the San Francisco Bay Area. There are approximately 2.8 million trips between 5 a.m. and 12 p.m. 163,098 trips are chosen as potential UAM trips and simulated with the rest of the driving trips. The results show that 78% of 163,098 trips saved time through multi-modal UAM with an average saving of 27 minutes compared with driving.