PhD Forum: Exploring Urban Air Mobility Applications by Optimizing Operations Through Computational Means

The growing shift of populations from rural regions to cities-driven by diverse socio-economic reasons-has placed significant strain on urban transportation systems, which struggle to meet the demands of rapidly expanding city populations. This has prompted the exploration of innovative and dependable mobility solutions that can overcome the limitations of ground-based infrastructure. Urban Air Mobility (UAM), which utilizes airborne vehicles to move people and goods, emerges as a promising approach to alleviate these pressures. The domain presents a wealth of research opportunities across multiple di-mensions, including flight scheduling, safe navigation and air traffic management, cost-efficient assignment of vehicles to transport tasks, and robust communication strategies that leverage current infrastructure while addressing the unique challenges of aerial data transmission, such as delay reduction and data integrity. This paper delves into several computational angles of UAM deployment across diverse sectors, from sustainable operation to medical applications. Some results and preliminary analysis are presented to highlight the utility of the schemes. Other areas of implementing UAM from a computational perspective are mentioned briefly as a roadmap for future work.