Heuristic Approach for Arrival Sequencing and Scheduling for eVTOL Aircraft in On-Demand Urban Air Mobility

Abstract

The electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft sequencing and scheduling problem have been formulated in urban air mobility (UAM) context for a mixed fleet (winged/wingless) of eVTOLs expected to land on a vertiport with single landing pad. The objective of the problem is to minimize the makespan (landing completion time) of a given set of eVTOLs, which is equivalent to maximizing the arrival throughput. The landing order (sequence) and makespan of the mixed fleet is optimized using a heuristic approach called insertion and local search (ILS) combined with two different scheduling methods i) mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) or ii) time-advance (TA) algorithm. Finally, sensitivity analysis is performed to see the impact of number of eVTOLs expected to land on computational times of both the algorithms. Through numerical simulations and sensitivity analysis, our algorithms demonstrated real-time scheduling capabilities for on-demand UAM arrivals, which can be used as a potential future service for UAM vertiports and terminal airspace.