Capacity-Constrained Urban Air Mobility Scheduling

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new scheduling algorithm for urban air mobility networks that accounts for capacity limits and travel time uncertainties, ensuring safety and efficiency in city-based air transportation.

Contribution

It presents a tractable model and algorithm for scheduling trips in urban air mobility networks with capacity constraints and uncertain travel times, including dynamic updates.

Findings

Theoretical bounds on network throughput are established.

The scheduling algorithm guarantees safety and deadline adherence.

Case studies demonstrate practical effectiveness of the approach.

Abstract

This paper studies the problem of scheduling urban air mobility trips when travel times are uncertain and capacity at destinations is limited. Urban air mobility, in which air transportation is used for relatively short trips within a city or region, is emerging as a possible component in future transportation networks. Destinations in urban air mobility networks, called vertiports or vertistops, typically have limited landing capacity, and, for safety, it must be guaranteed that an air vehicle will be able to land before it can be allowed to take off. We first present a tractable model of urban air mobility networks that accounts for limited landing capacity and uncertain travel times between destinations with lower and upper travel time bounds. We then establish theoretical bounds on the achievable throughput of the network. Next, we present a tractable algorithm for scheduling trips to satisfy safety constraints and arrival deadlines. The algorithm allows for dynamically updating the schedule to accommodate, e.g., new demands over time. The paper concludes with case studies that demonstrate the algorithm on two networks.