Simulating Urban Air Mobility Supply

Abstract

Urban air mobility (UAM) is a relatively new concept in the transportation industry. As on-demand services like Uber and Lyft have transformed our daily lives, our objective is to explore how on-demand UAM impacts mobility patterns by modeling the supply-side of such a service within a realistic, high-fidelity simulation. We present a design and implementation of UAM within SimMobility, a multi-scale, multi-modal activity- and agent-based simulation software, which was developed in the MIT Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Lab. This includes a network of vertiports, fleet of UAM aircrafts, and controller logic to accommodate passenger requests and control the fleet. We also implement novel service features including priority landing, stand designation, and matching algorithm customization through parameterized buffer times. Explicit models to simulate key characteristics of UAM services, supported by a comprehensive review of the underlying literature, has enabled us to develop a uniquely realistic simulation consistent with state-of-the-art technological developments, as well as the current urban landscape. The contribution of this thesis is twofold: first in the realistic simulation of UAM supply as described, and second in providing a replicable architecture that can be emulated for future SimMobility mobility service controllers.