Mathematical Models for Scheduling Electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) Vehicles at Urban Air Mobility Vertiports

Over the last years, there have been significant technological advances in electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) vehicles. Currently, multiple companies are working to establish new air transportation services in urban areas, such as air taxis. With the growing number of projects and interest in these new air services, urban airspace can become congested within the next decade. A key element of these emerging aviation markets that uses eVTOL vehicles is their take-off and landing areas, known as vertiports or skyports. The high volume of expected eVTOL aircraft can cause vertiports to become the bottleneck of urban air operations. Therefore, the aircraft should be efficiently scheduled using appropriate decision tools. This study proposes two mathematical formulations for scheduling take-off and landing aircraft at vertiports. The models consider urban air mobility operational characteristics such as separation times and blocking constraints to avoid collisions while the aircraft use the vertiport. As objective function, we minimize the completion of the last aircraft operation at vertiports. Results show that the optimization models assign and sequence aircraft at vertiport components to both departing and landing aircraft considering separations in the vertiport gates, touchdown and liftoff (TLOF) pads, and in common ground taxi routes. This paper hence opens avenues for further research.