Optimal eVTOL Charging and Passenger Serving Scheduling for On-Demand Urban Air Mobility
Zhiqiang Wu, Yu Zhang
Abstract
One of the critical obstacles that restricts the large-scale urban air mobility (UAM) service is limited flight range of electric vertical takeoff and landing aircrafts (eVTOL). Continuous operations as well as on-demand service require frequent recharge of eVTOLs within a limited time. On the one hand, it puts high requirements on battery energy storage and facility charging rate. On the other hand, a well-designed scheduling strategy should be implemented to satisfy the recharging needs of eVTOL while satisfying the service demand from UAM users. In our research, a mixed integer program is developed to model the eVTOL charging scheduling process with the objective to minimize the total waiting time of passengers. The proposed model is able to solve the charging and passenger serving scheduling problem in a reasonable short time, making it feasible for real-time operations of UAM service. Meanwhile, the result analyses provide implications regarding the relations among the number of charging facilities, computation efficiency and the service quality.