Investigation of Heterogenous Fleets of Advanced Air Mobility Aircraft in an Agent-Based Simulation

Abstract

Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) is envisioned to involve a broad range of use cases posing contrasting requirements on the Aircraft. These use cases involve 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 AAM, and how the requirements of the vehicles differ when composed into a heterogenous fleet. This work investigates the following research questions:

RQ 1. Are heterogenous fleets better in comparison to homogenous fleets considering System of Systems Measures of Effectiveness? RQ 2. What is the optimal ratio with which to mix the two optimal concepts and does it change when the TLARs of the composing aircraft are varied? RQ 3. Do the TLARs of aircraft from Optimal Homogenous fleet compose the Optimal Heterogenous fleet?

Two optimal aircraft concepts each of a multirotor and a tiltrotor architecture, 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. For this evaluation, a nominal use case is setup to represent a mixed operational scenario of intracity and suburban scenarios. The fleets are evaluated using Measures of Effectiveness composed of the share of passengers choosing AAM, load factor, energy demand, and utilization rates through an Agent-Based Simulation of AAM.