Hub Location Problem For Optimal Vertiport Selection In Urban Air Mobility- Chicago Case Study

The research topic addressed by this work is UAM. In recent years, several improvements and big attention have been focused on this industry, claiming that the concept of shifting the mobility from traditional ground transportation towards the low-altitudes airways will disrupt the business and will help society both to solve the astonishingly increasing traffic congestion issue, and to shift to an environmentally sustainable solution. In particular, the research question of this work aims at solving the problem of the optimal location for the so called “vertiports”, namely the infrastructure needed to be designed and built in the urban environment. The problem is to find an effective way to easily obtain a starting point to work on, when dealing with this topic. Exploiting the HLP optimization problem as a reference approach, the goal has been to adapt HLP to the specific UAM service, refining the mathematical structure behind. The work will be structured like this: after an initial introduction in Chapter 1 of what UAM is, how is the current state of the art regarding aircraft, technologies and architectural design, the focus will go on the specific HLP problem and how it can be designed for a specific service, namely, an Airport Shuttling Service in the city of Chicago. In fact, based on existing literature, from Chapter 2 on the Methodology will be explained in detail, showing results and how the initial model has been improved and refined. Different comparisons and results will be showed then in Chapter 5, focusing on how the model works and change in different situations considered