Air taxi service for urban mobility: A critical review of recent developments, future challenges, and opportunities

Abstract

Expected to operate in the imminent future, air taxi service (ATS) is an aerial on-demand transport for a single passenger or a small group of riders, which seeks to transform the method of everyday commute. This uncharted territory in the emerging transportation world is anticipated to enable consumers bypass traffic congestion in urban road networks. By adopting an electric vertical takeoff and landing concept (eVTOL), air taxis could be operational from skyports retrofitted on building rooftops, thus gaining advantage from an implementation standpoint. Motivated by the potential impact of ATS, this study provides a review of air taxi systems and associated operations. We first discuss the current developments in the ATS (demand prediction, air taxi network design, and vehicle configuration). Next, we anticipate potential future challenges of ATS from an operations management perspective, and review the existing literature that could be leveraged to tackle these problems (ride-matching, pricing strategies, vehicle maintenance scheduling, and pilot training and recruitment). Finally, we detail future research opportunities in the air taxi domain.

Recommendations for emerging air taxi network operations based on online review analysis of helicopter services

“…In this type, the propellers are contained within a cylindrical duct that significantly reduces the noise produced from the tips of the rotors ( Kim et al, 2018 ). Rotor ducts significantly mitigate the effects of blade slap and allow for higher rotor velocity without additional production of vortex noise ( Rajendran and Srinivas (2020) ). Steeper ascent and descent angles will also limit the exposure area of the rotor vortex noise - with that factor into consideration, takeoff and landing will likely be the loudest portion of the operation ( Basset et al, 2018 ; Rajendran, 2020b ).…”

“…With the continuous growth of the population in large cities, traffic congestion has become an unavoidable issue that increases stress, accidents, and air pollution. Traffic gridlocks are not only detrimental to those who reside in large cities, but also contribute to the economic loss ( Rajendran and Srinivas, 2020 ). According to Inrix (2019) , an average commuter spends about an additional 90 min in traffic.…”

A Conceptual Design Methodology for e-VTOL Aircraft for Urban Air Mobility

“…Many companies (e.g., AIRBUS, Lilium, Joby Aviation) are developing several configurations to satisfy the above requirements [21,22]; among them, two main categories can be recognized: rotary wing and fixed wing aircraft. Multi-rotors (Figure 1d) or helicopters belong to the first category; tilt-wing (Figure 1a), tilt-rotor (Figure 1c) and "lift + cruise" (Figure 1b) to the second one [23,24].…”

“…When technology reaches a level of maturity capable to mitigate the safety and public acceptance concerns, air taxis will be suitable for autonomous operations. In this context, the word autonomous indicates that aircraft will be remotely controlled (enabling the Beyond Visual Flight Rules, BVFR) from a central command where a continuous exchange of data is performed [17,23,28,35].…”

Capacitated Location-Allocation-Routing Problem with Time Windows for On-Demand Urban Air Taxi Operation

“…Furthermore, in their study to identify the influential factors in the adoption of UAM, Al Haddad et al ( 12 ) call for optimizing the trip time. Following a review of recent developments in UAT and future challenges, Rajendran and Srinivas ( 19 ) argue that dynamic routing of air taxis and integration of ground and air transportation scheduling is in need of further research. Straubinger et al ( 13 ) provide a review of recent research and developments in UAM and maintain that advances in the modeling of passenger pooling and aircraft dispatching are required.…”