Operational Concepts for Urban Air Mobility deployment in the next decades

Abstract

Urban Air Mobility development and deployment into future cities is gaining increasing and relevant interest in the last years, as a new mobility form suitable to meet the future greener, scalable and efficient mobility targets needed to solve the issues today’s big cities are facing in terms of traffic congestion as well as related environmental consequences. In this framework, the ASSURED UAM (Acceptance, Safety and Sustainability Recommendations for Efficient Deployment of UAM) project has been funded by H2020 and is ongoing, with the main objective of providing cities with knowledge concerning deployment of UAM services and definition of necessary standards and recommendations assuring common acceptance, safety and sustainability within integrated metropolitan transport system for three time horizons (2025, 2030 and 2035). In the project, dedicated activities have been carried out to develop operational concepts for Urban Air Mobility (UAM) deployment in the next decades. The main results from these activities are presented in this paper, which namely includes the main project outcomes in terms of: the identification of the most relevant and promising technologies that can enable the UAM implementation over the next decades, taking into account the current technological trends and perspectives; the outline of the regulatory framework in which the UAM will be shaped in the next decades; the definition of the most relevant aspects and constraints affecting the UAM deployment from the point of view of integration of such new mobility form in the cities infrastructures; the outline of the foreseen UAM concept of operations and definition of the most relevant use case that are expected to be implemented in the cities over the three time horizons considered in the project, i.e. 2025, 2030 and 2035.