Passenger-centric Urban Air Mobility: Fairness trade-offs and operational efficiency

Abstract

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) envisions safe transportation systems that will exploit new vertical takeoff and landing electric aircraft to transport passengers or cargo within urban and suburban areas. To be successful, it will require an integrated approach able to balance efficiency and safety while leveraging common resources and information. In this work we focus on future urban air-taxi services, and present the first methods and algorithms to efficiently operate air-taxi at scale. Our approach is twofold. First, we use a passenger-centric perspective which introduces traveling classes, and information sharing between transport modes to differentiate quality of services. This helps smooth multimodal journeys and increase passenger satisfaction. Second, we provide a flight routing and recharging solution which minimizes direct operational costs while preserving long term battery life through reduced energy-intense recharging. Our methods, which surpass the performance of a general state-of-the-art commercial solver, are also used to gain meaningful insights on the design space of the air-taxi problem, including solutions to hidden fairness issues.