Design of a Vertiport Design Tool
Taylor Megan, Saldanli Asya, Andy Park
Abstract
Advances in technology enable the deployment of an Urban Air Mobility (UAM) transportation system for congested metropolitan areas. A key element of UAM are vertiports, the infrastructure that electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles (eVTOLs) use to land and take-off. A Vertiport Design Tool (VDT) was developed for use by architecture firms designing vertiports to evaluate operational trade-offs between vertiport surface area and vehicle throughput. A stochastic Monte Carlo simulation was developed to calculate vehicle throughput for different vertiport design alternatives, safety risk, and noise constraints. Results show that for every 420 m <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> increase in vertiport surface area, the throughput increases by one vehicle per hour. For this, the time between vehicle arrivals also needs to decrease by 5 minutes for more arrivals to occur.