Dynamic Lane Allocation in UAM Corridors for Efficient Multimodal Door-to-Door Mobility
For urban air mobility system designers, this work addresses the under-utilization of lane-based airspace, offering a safe way to increase throughput and improve multimodal mobility.
This paper introduces a dynamic directional lane allocation method for UAM corridors, formulated as a MILP, and demonstrates in a San Francisco Bay Area case study that it reduces unused airspace capacity by 5x, increases mean lane utilization to 67%, and cuts mean travel time by up to 21.6%.
This article presents dynamic directional lane allocation in urban air mobility (UAM) corridors as a discrete-time mixed-integer linear program (MILP). This formulation activates, deactivates, and reverses lane direction as bi-directional airspace demand evolves. We model demand from disaggregate ground travel data by decomposing each trip into a multi-modal sequence with first-, middle-, and last-mile legs and routing the UAM-served middle-mile segment through a vertiport-side dispatch model. We use the San Francisco Bay Area as a case study by placing a multi-region spanning corridor between Contra Costa county and Silicon Valley. We find that the dynamic policy cuts unused airspace capacity by 5x, increases mean lane utilization from 36-48% to 67% at the same service level relative to baselines, and reduces commuting-population mean travel time by up to 21.6%. These results show that dynamic configuration of airspace capacity alleviates a significant percentage of the under-utilization issue of lane-based UAM airspace design and UAM concept of operations. This dynamic allocation also provides a safe, structural way to increase throughput, making UAM a more viable complement to multimodal door-to-door mobility systems.