Designing Skyport Networks: A Hub Location Approach for Urban Air Mobility

As urbanization accelerates, cities face more traffic congestion issues, leading to a greater demand for faster and more convenient transportation options. Urban Air Mobility (UAM) offers a viable solution, encompassing applications such as delivery services, air taxis, and air metro systems, which rely on skyports as hubs for these vehicles. This study focuses on the skyport location and demand allocation problem within UAM operations. To address this, we pose the problem as an UHLPSA model, adopted from the location science literature. By designating skyports as hubs for air taxi services, our goal is to minimize total transportation costs while optimizing routing between origin and destination points according to traffic flow. Using a commercial off-the-shelf solver, we demonstrate the solution characteristics with respect to different number of skyports through a case study of Ohio. The numerical results provide insights into Ohio's potential UAM infrastructure.