Utilizing eVTOL Aircraft to Alleviate Traffic Congestion on an Arterial Road

The development of electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircrafts promotes the prosperity of Urban Air Mobility (UAM). While numerous efforts have been made on UAM, little was focusing on the integrated operation of UAM and ground transportation system. This paper thus investigated how to alleviate traffic congestion on an arterial road with a bottleneck via using eVTOL aircrafts to transfer passengers upstream the bottleneck to downstream. The location, opening and closing time of the vertiports and the transfer ratio of the passengers are optimized with the objective of minimizing the average monetary cost, which is an integrated evaluation value converted by the electricity consumption, travel time and vertiport operating cost. Based on this, an optimization model is constructed and Dividing RECTangles algorithm is adopted to solve it using the simulation module as a subroutine. Simulation results show that the proposed method is capable of reducing average monetary cost and average travel time. Moreover, due to the differences in salaries and electricity prices, the departure vertiport in U.S. case should be positioned as close to the upstream as possible, while in China it is the opposite. More importantly, we found that the successful implementation of the proposed method requires the ride-sharing service provider to arrange the travel plan in a unified manner because of the higher cost of transferred passengers. This research pioneers a novel UAM-based method to alleviate traffic congestion on an arterial road, setting the stage for the full exploitation of UAM capabilities to reduce ground traffic congestion.