Energy-Aware Location-Routing for Regional Air Mobility: A Case Study on East Tennessee

Regional Air Mobility (RAM) is a powerful method of transportation that will allow fast and reliable commutes between cities. Most RAM vehicles are expected to be electric, and therefore charging of these vehicles will cause a significant impact on the electric grid. Extensive infrastructure planning studies must be conducted to determine the appropriate grid upgrade costs necessary to support aircraft charging. This paper constructs an optimization framework to determine the optimal RAM portal locations that will meet travel demand and minimize electric infrastructure upgrade costs. In order to validate the optimization framework, a case study is conducted on the east Tennessee region. First, an Uncapacitated Location-Routing Problem (ULRP) is formulated and solved with an unrestricted number of RAM facilities to be developed. Next, a series of ULRPs are formulated and solved with a fixed number of RAM facilities to be developed. Lastly, the net revenue for each fixed-facility ULRP is assessed in order to determine the optimal number of RAM facilities that will maximize profit and cost trade-offs in east Tennessee.