An Intermodal Framework for AAM: Vision and Demo from the COLOSSUS Project

Kurzfassung

Advanced Air Mobility paradigm envisions a world where novel aircraft concepts are used to connect urban population centers allowing for faster and more efficient travel. In literature, a high degree of emphasis is placed on the importance of integrating the AAM network seamlessly into the existing intermodal transport network allowing for more people to use the service and reducing the time penalty for those switching to and from the AAM mode of travel. However, for it to a widely adopted transport mode, large scale operations would be needed to reduce its price and thus the barrier of entry. Achieving such large-scale operations over built up areas is by itself a challenging problem from a safety standpoint. Many other questions arise in this domain, which require a comprehensive approach touching on all involved domains to be able to evaluate. The COLOSSUS Project employs a holistic and multi-level approach which integrates the Subsystem, Constituent System, System of Systems and Business Models into a singular framework, and applies it onto two different use cases: Sustainable Intermodal Mobility and Aerial Wildfire Fighting. The former use case, on which this work is focused, is centered on the development and exploitation of an Intermodal Simulation of ground transport, regional air travel, and advanced air mobility. A multi-scale approach from intra-city to intra-European is taken to be able to assess the effect of introducing novel air transport modes across the different scales from the various stakeholder perspectives. These perspectives can be vastly different: a vehicle operators’ perspective is focused on the vehicle’s effectiveness in transporting passengers across its region of operations, whereas, a policymaker may be more interested in how new vehicles can complement the existing transport network and improve the connectivity at a European scale. Therefore, the project ensures perspectives of the different stakeholders can be captured and evaluated holistically in the design and evaluation of the System of Systems. As AAM also requires the use of advanced technology to enable the novel aircraft designs and their operations, a multi-level approach is employed in this work connecting technology – subsystem – constituent system –system of systems – and business/value models.