VERTIM: A Framework for Vertiport Placement for Urban Air Mobility

Urban air mobility (UAM) with electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicles can help address ground traffic congestion. Good selection of vertiports (where eVTOLs take off and land) is key for UAM adoption. Existing works on vertiport placement either do not consider UAM as part of a multimodal transportation setup or do not consider realistic flight trajectories and travel times of eVTOLs. Not considering these factors can result in suboptimal vertiport placement. We develop an optimization framework called VERTIM for vertiport placement. VERTIM aims to maximize travel time savings from UAM in a multimodal transportation setup. For an accurate and realistic travel time estimation, VERTIM computes time-optimal flight trajectories while considering a wind field, obstacles, and battery energy limitations. We demonstrate our framework in New York City and Bengaluru for travel to the respective city airports. Our experiments show that optimal vertiport placement can reduce multimodal taxi+eVTOL travel time by up to 50% over a taxi-only ride, depending on the city. We also observe that the eVTOL flight trajectories, the battery charge levels, the eVTOL wait times, the ground-taxi times, and the demand for travel to the airport all affect the achievable time savings and the optimal vertiport locations.