An Integrated Urban Transport Planning Framework for Urban Air Mobility: Network Design, Multimodal Integration, and Application to Baghdad

Most Urban Air Mobility (UAM) siting studies treat vertiport location as an isolated spatial-optimization problem, calibrated to cities with mature transport infrastructure and regulatory systems. This study instead develops an integrated planning framework linking spatial and regulatory feasibility, travel demand, vertiport network configuration, multimodal integration, environmental and operational performance, infrastructure and regulatory readiness, and phased deployment within a single process. The framework’s architecture is transferable across cities, while its calibration parameters are city-specific. It is applied to Baghdad, Iraq, as an infrastructure-constrained, rapidly urbanizing case, combining GIS-based suitability mapping, an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), simulation (AnyLogic, BlueSky, VISSIM), and noise/emissions modeling (AEDT/INM) across five candidate sites. A distributed configuration achieves the highest accessibility, travel-time savings of 40–50%, and the largest emission reduction (28%), although the highest-demand sites require noise mitigation before deployment, showing that demand alone does not indicate deployment readiness. Consultation with 28 stakeholders and a four-stage phased-deployment model link these results to an implementable rollout strategy. The findings demonstrate a transferable planning methodology, rather than Baghdad-specific results, for integrating UAM into multimodal transport systems under spatial, infrastructural, environmental, and regulatory constraints.