The deployment and subsequent development of an Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) transportation system is expected to take an incredible amount of resources in terms of planning, time and capital. Due to the system not yet being operational anywhere, and consequently, the lack of clear operational boundaries set, researchers and developers are left with an enormous design space. Currently, parallel independent developments are taking place in all aspects of the system, and different perspectives have enabled a wide range of concepts to be formulated in each. Whereas independent assessments provide crucial insights into the individual components of the system themselves, they fail to capture the inherent interdependencies. They also do not capture the growth of the aircraft fleet in correlation with the growth of the vertiport network. This gives rise to the need for a framework which is capable of establishing a preliminary vertiport network to allow for the study of the aircraft, fleet and total system performance in a coherent manner, and the scalable correlated evolution thereof. Consequently, this study aims to develop a unified framework for the formation of a scalable vertiport allocation plan in conjunction with system-performance-based heterogeneous fleet sizing. The scalable vertiport allocator employs a distance-based agglomerative clustering algorithm to determine the clusters in the ultimate vertiport network and the k-means clustering algorithm to determine the preliminary location of the vertiport per cluster. This is followed by a commute-distance based vertiport elimination procedure to establish each vertiport network to be assessed. The optimal fleet at each stage of network growth is established through a parameter sweep conducted across the fleet size and composition. The system-based performance metrics of the combinations of vertiport network and fleet are then assessed using an on-demand agent-based simulation. The framework is applied to New York (NY) state and models of existing multi-rotor (MR) and tilt-rotor (TR) aircraft are utilized as test case. The test case results show the applicability of the framework in the establishment of a scalable preliminary vertiport allocation plan to maximize system commute distance, and the correlated growth of the optimal fleet based on the maximum system performance.

This study presents the development of a multimodal System of Systems (SoS) framework, to assess the impact of top-level aircraft requirements in providing advanced air door-to-door mobility. The field of Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) is rapidly evolving, and while current research assesses these vehicles from
both aircraft design and operational perspectives, a system of systems perspective combining both domains is required to find the best overall vehicle design and operational concepts. In this work, aircraft design is assessed by its effectiveness in the operating environment, considering the perspective of the stakeholders of passengers, operators and European policy makers. This is done through combining aircraft design in an agent-based multimodal simulation framework, covering both surface and air transport. Doing so allows us
to analyse the impact of top-level aircraft requirements on door-to-door travel time, AAM mode share and energy consumption per passenger. Using this framework, it was found that the most impactful parameter on AAM utilization is the passenger’s mean value of time. Additionally, several SoS effects could be traced to changes at the agent level, where giving passengers more travel options leads to 16% higher AAM adoption, but at shorter (-8.2 %) average trip distances due to preferences for shorter and cheaper flights. Lastly, the
relevance of considering operations for aircraft design was seen, where the best theoretical design for energy efficiency performed 10% worse than the best design considering operations, as the average mission profile in operation is different to the designed profile. In conclusion, the developed framework demonstrates the need for combining operations and aircraft design, and can be used to explore the best concepts in both fields.