Development of Vertiport Capacity Envelopes and Analysis of Their Sensitivity to Topological and Operational Factors

Abstract

This study develops an Integer Programming (IP) approach to analytically estimate vertiport capacity envelopes. The approach is used to determine the sensitivity of vertiport capacity to the number and layout of touchdown and liftoff pads, taxiways, gates, and parking pads (i.e. the vertiport topology). The study also assesses the sensitivity of vertiport capacity to operational parameters including taxi time, turnaround time, pre-staged aircraft, and approach/departure procedure independence, among others. Findings indicate the importance of balancing the number of touchdown and liftoff pads with the number of gates to achieve maximum aircraft throughput per vertiport footprint. Furthermore, simultaneous paired arrivals or departures provide significant throughput gains without the need for fully independent approach and departure procedures. The methodology and findings introduced in this paper support the development of concepts of operation to maximize throughput for a given vertiport footprint and demand scenario. While throughput has been extensively researched for fixed-wing operations, little research has been dedicated to the operation of infrastructure for Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) aircraft. The emergence of new VTOL aircraft to conduct a potentially large number of urban air mobility operations creates a need to better understand the operation and throughput capacity of vertiports, especially in space constrained inner-city locations. This paper reviews numerous existing heliport designs to derive four topology classes of vertiport layouts. The IP formulation of vertiport operations is readily adapted to represent the infrastructure and operations of these layouts.

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

“…Studies, such as Rajendran (2020b) , Rajendran and Shulman (2020) , and Hasan (2019) , have named two types of infrastructures when considering the station locations, vertistop and vertiport. While vertistops are smaller facilities having infrastructures only for customer pickup and dropoff, vertiports are larger sites with air taxi maintenance, charging, and docking stations ( Vascik and Hansman, 2019 ).…”

Determining infrastructure requirements for an air taxi service at Cologne Bonn Airport

“…However, Eq. (2) developed by Vascik implies additional taxi time and gives the result of nine stands, assuming a taxi time of 1 min [15]. We, therefore, consider the result of five stands as minimum requirement that can desirably be extended to the number of nine if the required footprint is available.…”

Application of Munich Agile Concepts for Mbse as a Holistic and Systematic Design of Urban Air Mobility in Case of Design of Vertiports and Vertistops

“…In addition, UAM operations typically occur in metropolitan areas that are densely populated in terms of passenger, unlike traditional aviation, which normally spends the majority of flight time in sparsely populated areas by design (Thipphavong et al, 2018).  Community Acceptance: Although UAM 's community acceptance can be affected by various factors including privacy, visibility, emissions, protection, and equity, aircraft noise has been the most common externality of aviation leading to community-imposed limits on the scale of the previous helicopter and transport aircraft flights (Vascik and Hansman, 2019;Thipphavong et al, 2018). The service can achieve public approval only if it can be shown to work safely.…”