Estimating Throughput for Urban Air Mobility Operations

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is a new air transportation service concept to carry passengers or cargo in urban areas with advanced technologies. To evolve the UAM ecosystem towards the higher level of operational density and complexity, appropriate airspace construct design and airspace management services should be developed. For efficient air traffic management and strategic airspace resource planning for UAM operations, it is necessary to estimate the capacity of airspace resources and the maximum throughput that can be achieved by the given airspace construct design. This paper proposes a simple analytical method to estimate the maximum throughput for a given route structure by combining existing capacity estimation approaches for individual resources like vertiports and fleet availability and considering other factors that can affect the throughput. The proposed throughput estimation model is applied to a simple UAM route network in Dallas/Fort Worth metropolitan area and evaluated with a realistic traffic scenario. The evaluation results show that this throughput estimation model can identify the most significant factor affecting the capacity and predict how the throughput changes in dynamic operating environments.