Urban Air Mobility (UAM) operations

UAM is a new mode of transportation and will fundamentally change current concepts of air transportation operations, which are based on schedules and constrained by predefined air routes under air traffic control. Moreover, when ground transportation is partially replaced by UAM, UAM's traffic volume will exceed that of traditional air transportation and low-altitude airspace will be congested.

ATM@KAU is interested in optimizing UAM operations such as:

  • vehicle route scheduling

  • optimal fleet design

Vertiport planning

Vertiport is a station or airport for UAM. It can also serve as a multimodal transport hub, where people can transfer between ground and air transportation services.

ATM@KAU is interested in optimizing vertiport design such as:

  • vertiport location

  • vertiport capacities

Airspace capacity analysis

The objective of Air Traffic Flow Management (ATFM) is to accommodate traffic demand within the capacity of airspace and airport. Thus, it is important to predict the capacity accurately.

ATM@KAU is interested in predicting the capacity of airspace and airport by using:

  • machine learning techniques

  • human-in-the-loop simulation

Airport operations

Airports are bottlenecks limiting the throughput of the air transportation system. Specifically, runways at major airports suffer from an imbalance between demand and capacity. Efficiency of runway (and also airport) operations depends not only on runway scheduling and assignments, but also on taxiway scheduling, gate assignments, and even overhead stream.

ATM@KAU is interested in optimizing airport operations such as:

  • runway schedule

  • taxi route

  • passenger flow

  • flight delay

Safety analysis

Safety is the most important issue in a transportation system. Safety risk of a hazardous event is the product of the probability and severity of the event. So, the key element of risk assessment is to estimate the probability of hazardous events and evaluate their consequences.

ATM@KAU is interested in assessing safety risk of air transportation systems such as:

  • en-route traffic

  • remotely piloted aircraft system

  • (small) unmanned aircraft system

  • UAM

Demand modelling

Transportation and mobility services can be simulated more realistically by estimating their demands as accurately as possible. However, it is very difficult to estimate the demand for future transport that has not yet been implemented.

ATM@KAU is interested in modelling future transportation demand such as:

  • unmanned aircraft system

  • UAM