VAMOS! A Regional Modeling and Simulation System for Vertiport Location Assessment

This paper presents an approach to assess the suitability of vertiport locations and evaluate the feasibility of flights between them for the Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) concept. The motivation for the work comes from the infrastructure challenges to implement the AAM concept. The question of where should the vertiports be placed led to the development of the technology described in this paper. A modeling tool gathers various attributes desired by the local community (city or county planning departments) and aggregates them to create suitable vertiport locations. Site suitability is modeled with a composite suitability metric that is a weighted function of several characteristics of a location, some favorable and some not, all of which are a function of desired proximity to the site being considered. Then, a simulation system conducts a fast-time simulation of origin-to-destination operations in the urban region. The flight of various vehicles, with winds and obstacles, is simulated between the selected vertiport locations to assess feasibility of flight. The noise footprints and the battery depletion are also computed. A prototype system encompassing both, the vertiport location suitability assessment tool and the flight feasibility simulation system, was developed and evaluated with subject-matter experts in regional planning from four metropolitan areas. The outcome of those evaluations suggests the use case is sound and the prototype brings needed consistency to the decision-making process.