Evaluating the Impact of Urban Air Mobility Aerodrome Siting on Mode Choice

For Urban Air Mobility to service future transportation markets additional research is required to define where the emerging vehicles and service providers will operate. Research continues to provide applications of various siting formulations and methodologies using metropolitan areas such as San Francisco, Miami, Los Angeles, and Boston; however, there is limited work on siting approaches that investigate the impact of siting on passenger mode choice for a given metropolitan area. This paper investigates the impact of UAM-aerodrome siting on mode choice via trip effective cost modeling. The resulting optimal UAM-aerodrome networks undergo evaluation using a computational analysis framework to assess the number of UAM-preferred trips and provide guidance on siting UAM-aerodromes in the Chicago Metropolitan Area. The developed siting analysis generated multiple networks using various features; and the authors observed moderate improvements in the number of UAM-preferred trips as a result of marginal improvements in generated objective values.