A collaborative system of systems simulation of urban air mobility

Abstract The implementation of urban air mobility represents a complex challenge in aviation due to the high degree of innovation required across various domains to realize it. From the use of advanced aircraft powered by novel technologies, the management of the airspace to enable high density operations, to the operation of vertiports serving as a start and end point of the flights, urban air mobility paradigm necessitates significant innovation in many aspects of civil aviation as we know it today. To understand and assess the many facets of this new paradigm, a collaborative simulation is developed to holistically evaluate the system of systems through the modeling of the stakeholders and their interactions as per the envisioned concept of operations. To this end, models of vertiport air-side operations, unmanned/manned airspace management, demand estimation and passenger mode choice, vehicle operator cost and revenues, vehicle design, and fleet management are brought together into a system of systems simulation of urban air mobility. Through collaboration, higher fidelity models of each domain can be integrated into a single environment achieving fidelity levels not easily achievable otherwise. Furthermore, the integration enables the capture of cross-domain effects and allows domain-specific studies to be evaluated at a holistic level. This work demonstrates the collaborative simulation and the process of building it through the integration of several geographically distributed tools into an agent-based simulation without the need for sharing code.