System of Systems driven fleet design for Urban Air Mobility: heterogeneity over homogeneity?

Abstract

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) represents a new paradigm in aviation involving high intensity short distance air travel using low capacity vertical take-off and landing aircraft. As this new paradigm necessitates a departure from many traditional aspects of the existing air transportation system, a large body of research is necessary to better understand the novel requirements and how they can be served by different technologies. These aspects include but are not limited to airspace management, vertiport design and management, aircraft design with innovative subsystem technologies, etc. A wide range of operational scenarios is envisioned for UAM involving different ranges, tempos of operations, and expected demand. This translates to a suite of different vehicles being developed by the industry with different architecture and top-level requirements. The aim of this work is to evaluate the need for heterogenous fleets to suit the different operational scenarios envisioned for UAM. Two optimized aircraft concepts, a multirotor and a tiltrotor concept, derived from a system of systems driven aircraft design approach is first evaluated in a homogenous fleet, and then in a heterogenous fleet with varying degrees of heterogeneity. The ideal mix of heterogeneity is identified for a given setup considering economic and ecological efficiency from which generalizations are drawn. For this evaluation, a nominal use case is setup to represent a mixed operational scenario of intra-city and suburban scenarios. The fleets are evaluated against Measures of Effectiveness (MoEs) including passenger throughput, share of received requests that were served, wait time of passengers, deadhead ratio, load factor, and total energy consumption of the network. These MoEs are obtained using an agent-based simulation of UAM system of systems.