Score: 4

From Patchwork to Network: A Comprehensive Framework for Demand Analysis and Fleet Optimization of Urban Air Mobility

Published: October 5, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2510.04186v1

By: Xuan Jiang , Xuanyu Zhou , Yibo Zhao and more

BigTech Affiliations: University of California, Berkeley Johns Hopkins University Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Potential Business Impact:

Flies people faster in cities using airports.

Business Areas:
Drone Management Hardware, Software

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) presents a transformative vision for metropolitan transportation, but its practical implementation is hindered by substantial infrastructure costs and operational complexities. We address these challenges by modeling a UAM network that leverages existing regional airports and operates with an optimized, heterogeneous fleet of aircraft. We introduce LPSim, a Large-Scale Parallel Simulation framework that utilizes multi-GPU computing to co-optimize UAM demand, fleet operations, and ground transportation interactions simultaneously. Our equilibrium search algorithm is extended to accurately forecast demand and determine the most efficient fleet composition. Applied to a case study of the San Francisco Bay Area, our results demonstrate that this UAM model can yield over 20 minutes' travel time savings for 230,000 selected trips. However, the analysis also reveals that system-wide success is critically dependent on seamless integration with ground access and dynamic scheduling.

Country of Origin
πŸ‡¨πŸ‡³ πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡Έ United States, China

Page Count
22 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing