Enhancing Accessibility in Rural Areas through Advanced Air Mobility

We address the contribution of a future Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) service to the accessibility of important facilities and thereby focus on rural areas. For our case study, we choose two different use case orientations: emergency services and leisure activities, represented by hospitals and cinemas, respectively. Both are defined as relevant points of interest (POIs), which are to be reached via a local vertiport on site. The challenge is to define suitably located vertiports as starting points that enable the population to reach these locations. This problem is initially treated as a location allocation analysis. The special feature of our method lies in the use of a k-means algorithm for the targeted clustering of vertiports. We can show that the door-to-door accessibility of the named locations is significantly improved by the use of AAM. Our method outperforms comparable approaches that are based purely on travel time-based algorithms.