Development of Decision Support Systems for Advanced Air Mobility Operations in Korea

The Republic of Korea government has started exploring the implementation of advanced air mobility (AAM) due to its potential to enhance connectivity in both urban and regional areas. The implementation of AAM requires careful decisions to address critical challenges such as vertiport placement and corridor network design. This paper presents the development of decision support systems to evaluate various operational strategies for upcoming AAM operations in Republic of Korea. Three interconnected systems are developed by leveraging a data-driven approach: unsupervised learning-based vertiport placement, dynamic corridor network generation, and flight-path planning. Each system uses relevant data sets tailored to its specific purpose and employs algorithms to enable the proposed concepts. The main contributions of this research are to 1) propose an unsupervised learning-based approach that can be used for identifying optimal vertiport locations in the Korean peninsula, 2) establish a dynamic corridor network generation system for AAM operations, and 3) develop a multi-objective flight-path optimization system customized to AAM operations in Republic of Korea. The authors believe that these systems can be used to assess various operational initiatives, particularly for single-flight scenarios; hence, the Republic of Korea government can make informed decisions for the effective implementation of upcoming AAM operations in Republic of Korea.