Demand-Driven Vertiport Siting and Discrete-Event Fleet Simulation for On-Demand Urban Air Mobility Network Design
This paper presents a demand-driven framework for on-demand Urban Air Mobility (UAM) network design that links vertiport siting, fleet simulation, and door-to-door travel-time feasibility. Demand is estimated from commuter and passenger activity data, converted into spatial trip-end points, and clustered using K-means to generate candidate vertiport locations. Candidate networks are screened using range and minimum station-spacing constraints, then evaluated with a discrete-event simulation that models multi-vehicle dispatch, deadhead relocation, battery swaps, and service regularity. Flight time and energy consumption are computed using a point-mass eVTOL performance model. In a Greater Los Angeles case study, the preferred design expands from four stations and four eVTOLs at low demand to sixteen stations and twelve eVTOLs at the highest tested demand level. Results show that larger fleets improve completion time and vehicle-arrival regularity but do not eliminate deadhead flights, indicating that spatial demand imbalance remains an operational burden. The travel-time savings analysis further suggests that UAM is most defensible for longer or congestion-heavy trips where sufficient non-flight time remains after accounting for flight time.