The Optimal Size of a Heterogeneous Air Taxi Fleet in Advanced Air Mobility: A Traffic Demand and Flight Scheduling Approach

Introducing Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) as a novel transportation mode poses unique challenges due to limited practical and empirical data. One of these challenges involves accurately estimating future passenger demand and the required number of air taxis, given uncertainties in modal shift dynamics, induced traffic patterns, and long-term price elasticity. In our study, we use mobility data obtained from a Dresden traffic survey and modal shift rates to estimate the demand for AAM air taxi operations for this regional use case. We organize these operations into an air taxi rotation schedule using a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) optimization model and set a tolerance for slight deviations from the requested arrival times for higher productivity. The resulting schedule aids in determining the AAM fleet size while accounting for flight performance, energy consumption, and battery charging requirements tailored to three distinct types of air taxi fleets. According to our case study, the methodology produces feasible and high-quality air taxi flight rotations within an efficient computational time of 1.5 h. The approach provides extensive insights into air taxi utilization, charging durations at various locations, and assists in fleet planning that adapts to varying, potentially uncertain, traffic demands. Our findings reveal an average productivity of 12 trips per day per air taxi, covering distances from 13 to 99 km. These outcomes contribute to a sustainable, business-focused implementation of AAM while highlighting the interaction between operational parameters and overall system performance and contributing to vertiport capacity considerations.