Novel electric aircraft designs coupled with intense efforts from academia, government and industry led to a paradigm shift in urban transportation by introducing UAM. While UAM promises to introduce a new mode of transport, it depends on ground infrastructure to operate safely and efficiently in a highly constrained urban environment. Due to its novelty, the research of UAM ground infrastructure is widely scattered. Therefore, this paper selects, categorizes and summarizes existing literature in a systematic fashion and strives to support the harmonization process of contributions made by industry, research and regulatory authorities. Through a document term matrix approach, we identified 49 Scopus-listed scientific publications (2016–2021) addressing the topic of UAM ground infrastructure with respect to airspace operation followed by design, location and network, throughput and capacity, ground operations, cost, safety, regulation, weather and lastly noise and security. Last listed topics from cost onwards appear to be substantially under-represented, but will be influencing current developments and challenges. This manuscript further presents regulatory considerations (Europe, U.S., international) and introduces additional noteworthy scientific publications and industry contributions. Initial uncertainties in naming UAM ground infrastructure seem to be overcome; vertiport is now being predominantly used when speaking about vertical take-off and landing UAM operations.

Urban air mobility (UAM) is the idea of creating a future mobility market through the introduction of a new mode of aerial transport with substantial travel time advantages. A key factor diminishing travel time savings is vertiport processes. So far, vertiport throughput capacity has only been studied in a static manner using analytical methods, which has been found to be insufficient. This paper wants to increase the level of understanding of operational dynamics on vertiport airfields by being the first to apply agent-based simulation. For this purpose, an existing vertiport model consisting of pads, gates and stands was refined through two means. First, a sensitivity study with over 100 simulations was executed shedding light on the driving processes on a vertiport airfield. Second, an expert interview series with 17 participants was conducted, letting the experts evaluate the model and specify relevant parameter values. Three main results should find mention here: (1) Pad operations were identified to be most impactful on passenger delays. (2) Pad and gate processes have a threshold capacity beyond which delays increase exponentially. (3) A refined vertiport model is presented, including the 27 most relevant parameters and their value specification. In conclusion, this paper finds that optimized vertiport airfield design is crucial to UAM operations, and dynamic passenger and vehicle interactions cannot be neglected.

Urban Air Mobility is a novel concept of transportation with unknown market potential. Even in conservative estimates, thousands of operations could be expected on a single vertiport. This exceeds known heliport operations, which is the most comparable existing mode of transport—by far. Vertiport operations, in particular the dynamics on the airfield, are not well understood; in the following article, we want to address this research gap. By using means of agent-based simulation, the following design drivers were identified: peaks in demand, imbalance between arrivals and departures, pad operations and gate operations. We calculate a practical hourly capacity of 264 movements for our baseline scenario consisting of 4 pads, 12 gates and 20 stand. We are further able to shown that avoiding this peak and staying below a maximum imbalance between arrivals and departures of less than 33 ensures an average passenger delay of less than 3 min. Lastly, we present a parameter study varying the number of pads and gates, the length of approach/departure and boarding/de-boarding and the level of demand. The results of this study are aggregated into a graphical design heuristic displaying the interchangeability of the mentioned aspects.

Urban Air Mobility has the potential to substantially reduce travel times in some cases of urban-related transportation. Travel time savings strongly depend on fast processing at vertiports, which presents a key challenge considering demand levels’ vertiports would experience when becoming an established mode of transport. This article sheds light on the passenger throughput vertiport airfields can manage and how the operations are sensitive to changes. One main contribution of this article is the introduction of hourly passenger throughput per area as a performance indicator that allows to compare vertiports of different sizes. VoloCity is studied as a reference vehicle and the resulting space requirement of the carefully specified baseline scenario is 188 square-meters per passenger per hour. A total of 13 prominent eVTOL designs are included in the study from which the current design space between maximum vehicle dimension and number of seats is deducted. The study shows that vehicles with a small maximum dimension yield the highest passenger throughput capacity. CityAirbus performs best (46.3 m²/PAX/h) with a diameter of 7.92 m and Archer Maker performs worst (221 m²/PAX/h) with a diameter of 12.2 m. How the performance indicators can be used as rules-of-thumb in the first-order estimations of vertiport throughput capacity or space requirement is described by means of illustrative examples. The insights presented in this paper might be useful for researches, vehicle developers, and municipalities alike.

An understanding of fleet size and vertiport size sensitivity to demand and operational parameters is necessary to quantify the scalability of urban air mobility (UAM) services. In this work, we implement a bilevel rolling window fleet scheduling formulation that includes vertiport area as a secondary objective. We also present a simple vertiport area estimation methodology that leverages the fleet scheduling results and provides a lower bound on vertiport infrastructure area requirements. Lastly, we explore the sensitivity of fleet size and vertiport infrastructure requirements to several vehicle and operational parameters, including geographical demand distribution, daily passenger volume, vehicle passenger capacity, passenger aggregation window, battery charge rate, pad separation, and pad size. We find that, although the fleet size is reasonable for a UAM commuting service scaled to serve 10,000 passengers per day, vertiport area requirements are likely problematic under current sizing guidance from the Federal Aviation Administration, particularly area requirements for vertiports that serve as workplace hubs located in dense urban centers.

Novel electric propulsion technology has given rise to thinking about urban air mobility in a new way with its expected high degree of operational flexibility. The designs of electric vertical takeoff and landing configurations are determined by their mission profile, which we found to be oversimplified at many points in the current scientific literature. There is a gap of understanding in how mission profiles impact travel time and energy demand. In this paper, we review various mission designs, formulate a five-segment flight profile (including vertical ascent, climb, cruise, descent, and vertical approach), and apply it on a fleet level of up to 200,000 urban air mobility trips. The demand data originate from the Upper Bavaria region study, OBUAM. In a sensitivity study, we vary the cruise altitude, the height of the vertical flight segments, and the climb and descent angles for two vehicle configurations: a fixed-wing tilt-rotor concept, and a multicopter concept. The main findings for the fixed-wing concept are that the height of the vertical flight segments and the cruise altitude should be as low as possible, and small climb angles (below 7 deg) should be avoided. The multicopter concept, however, is penalized by fast forward flight while being comparatively insensitive to both the cruise altitude and height of the vertical flight segments. Furthermore, we found a tradeoff between time- and energy-optimal flights with the a energy-optimized climb/descent angle at around 10 deg.