Viability of Piloted and Pilot-Less Air Metro: A Service Network Design for Scheduled Urban Air Mobility

Abstract

Emerging modes of urban air mobility (UAM) are potential alternatives to current ground transport. This paper first formulates a service network for the emerging air metro, which is a type of scheduled service with fixed routes that accommodates passengers for intra- or inter-city trips. The costs of piloted and pilot-less air metro scenarios are then compared, where the former has a labour cost for pilots and latter has a higher capital costs such as vehicle and automation costs. Then, a rolling horizon optimisation approach is proposed, where the temporal length of a single rolling horizon is an early confirmation period (ECP) plus a safety margin. The rolling horizon introduces decision arcs and marginal arcs with different capabilities in the networks for fleet, passengers and pilots. The optimised outputs on decision arcs are determined and fixed, while that on the marginal arcs can be continuously adjusted in the subsequent rolling horizons. Numerical studies are undertaken across all the involved variables using Greater Metropolitan Area of Sydney (GMAS), Australia, as a context. Results suggest that the pilot-less air metro would be economically preferable if the acquisition cost of an autonomous aircraft is less than 1.6 times that of a human-driven one. Furthermore, it is recommended to confirm the actual passenger demand at least 45 minutes in advance, and the length of a single rolling horizon should be longer than 150 minutes.

Keywords: Air metro, Autonomous VTOL, Rolling horizon, Time-space network, Urban air mobility