Vertiport Placement for Urban Air Mobility Airport Shuttle Service: Madrid case study

One of the core issues for successful implementation of Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is ground infrastructure (vertiports) planning and their integration into the cities. To address this challenge, we developed a vertiport placement model to support the decision-making process of commencing UAM airport shuttle service, which is one of the solutions from the SESAR Multimodal Access for Intelligent Airports (MAIA) project. The solution is a risk-averse two-stage-type mathematical model. We take a perspective of a UAM airport shuttle service provider as a strategic decision maker and one of the investors in infrastructure and vehicles. We show the results of the MAIA-UAM vertiport placement model, using the Community of Madrid and Adolfo Suárez Madrid–Barajas Airport (MAD) as a case study. To show performance of our model we compare it against facility location problem (FLP) benchmark.