Urban air mobility (UAM) is a revolutionary approach to transportation in densely populated cities. UAM involves using small, highly automated aircraft to transport passengers and goods at lower altitudes within urban and suburban areas, aiming to transform how people and parcels move within these environments. On average, UAM can reduce travel times by 30% to 40% for point-to-point journeys, with even greater reductions of 40% to 50% in major cities in the United States and China, compared to land transport. UAM includes advanced airborne transportation options like electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or drones). These technologies offer the potential to ease traffic congestion, decrease greenhouse gas emissions, and substantially cut travel times in urban areas. Studying the applications of eVTOLs and UAVs in parcel delivery and passenger transportation poses intricate challenges when examined through the lens of operations research (OR). By OR approaches, we mean mathematical programming, models, and solution methods addressing eVTOL- and UAV-aided parcel/people transportation problems. Despite the academic and practical importance, there is no review paper on eVTOL- and UAV-based optimization problems in the UAM sector. The present paper, applying a systematic literature review, develops a classification scheme for these problems, dividing them into routing and scheduling of eVTOLs and UAVs, infrastructure planning, safety and security, and the trade-off between efficiency and sustainability. The OR methodologies and the characteristics of the solution methods proposed for each problem are discussed. Finally, the study gaps and future research directions are presented alongside the concluding remarks.

This paper considers an electric vehicle charging scheduling setting where vehicle users can reserve charging time in advance at a charging station. In this setting, users are allowed to explicitly express their preferences over different start times and the length of charging periods for charging their vehicles. The goal is to compute optimal charging schedules that maximize the social welfare of all users given their time preferences and the state of charge of their vehicles. Assuming that users are self-interested agents who may behave strategically to advance their own benefits rather than the social welfare of all agents, we propose an iterative auction, which computes high-quality schedules and, at the same time, preserves users' privacy by progressively eliciting their preferences as necessary. We conduct a game theoretical analysis on the proposed iterative auction to prove its individual rationality and the best response for agents. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that the iterative auction can achieve high-efficiency solutions with a partial value information. Additionally, we explore the relationship between scheduling efficiency and information revelation in the auction.

The unprecedented growth of demand for charging electric vehicles (EVs) calls for novel expansion solutions to today’s charging networks. Riding on the wave of the proliferation of sharing economy, Airbnb-like charger sharing markets open the opportunity to expand the existing charging networks without requiring costly and time-consuming infrastructure investments, yet the successful design of such markets relies on innovations at the interface between game theory, mechanism design, and large scale optimization. In this paper, we propose a price-based iterative double auction for charger sharing markets where charger owners rent out their under-utilized chargers to the charge-needing EV drivers. Charger owners and EV drivers form a two-sided market which is cleared by a price-based double auction. Chargers’ locations, availabilities, and unit time service costs as well as drivers’ time and location preferences are considered in the allocation and scheduling process. The goal is to compute social welfare maximizing schedules which benefit both charger owners and EV drivers and, in turn, ensure the continuous growth of the market. We prove that the proposed double auction is budget balanced and individually rational. In addition, results from our computational study show that the proposed auction achieves on average 94% efficiency compared with that of the optimal solutions and is suitable for a larger day-ahead charger sharing market setting in terms of running time.

Highway charging scheduling for battery electric vehicles is a complex research issue depending on the fast charging capacity provided and the information available in coordinating drivers’ multiple charges at charging stations. Moreover, user’s partially-known preferences and potential dynamic events remain extra challenges in maximizing user’s satisfaction, improving the revenue of highway charging stations and utilizing the limited charging capacities. In such separate and simultaneous markets, users are reasonably modelled as the self-interested agents who aim to advance their own benefits but negotiable on their charging schedules. In this paper, we propose a simultaneous multi-round auction to address the highway charging scheduling problem, where users are allowed to bid and compromise on their preferred stops, charging time and energy simultaneously at separate charging stations. The objective is to maximize the total revenue of these stations. In the course of auction, users can gradually figure out how can their charges fit together by adaptively adjusting their bids placed at different stations. As a result, high-quality solutions are obtained and user’s privacy can be preserved by progressively eliciting their private preferences as necessary. In addition, we also develop a dynamic scheduling algorithm to address the changes of user’s reserved charges and unexpected arrivals of other vehicles. We conduct extensive experiments to validate our approach, the results demonstrate that it can achieve high efficiency with partial private information, as well as a higher revenue with dynamic scheduling algorithm. It can also greatly reduce the total waiting time of users against the first-come-first-serve policy.