Ground operation on vertiports – introduction of an agent-based simulation framework

Urban Air Mobility promises to introduce a fast mode of on-demand transportation that is envisioned to be affordable for a broad public in the future. Personal aerial vehicles have been studied since the dawn of commercial flight, but in recent years, these concepts experienced a revival due to novel technologies such as distributed electric propulsion and automation. Infrastructure has been identified by many institutions independently as being among the key constraints for scaling operations. The central infrastructural units in the system, the vertiports, have been studied substantially in terms of locations and networks. At the same time, ground operations on the airfield have been largely neglected, especially dynamic effects and delays emerging from operational contingencies. This paper attempts to illuminate the processes taking place on a vertiport through introducing an agent-based modeling and simulation framework for vertiport ground operations.