Impact of UAM Sitting on Travel Time Savings and Accessibility Improvements : A Case Study of Munich Metropolitan Area

In recent years, Urban Air Mobility (UAM) has attracted attention from users, industry groups, and transportation planners as an emerging transportation mode. Extensive studies have shown that the placement of UAM vertiports has a significant impact on both UAM demand and accessibility. This study utilizes clustering techniques to identify suitable locations for vertiports in the Munich Metropolitan Region (referred to as MUC and centered around Munich). Five allocation scenarios with 74 vertiports are generated by applying K-means (++) clustering, Gaussian mixture model clustering, agglomerative hierarchical clustering, and mean shift clustering on demand points, and compared with the scenario from the OBUAM project [1] with regard to travel time saving and accessibility improvement. The result indicates that time saving is expected to be achieved by trips above 25-30 km in all scenarios. For trips beyond 25km, all clustering scenarios outperform the OBUAM clustering regarding time saving performance. Both overly dense and sparse distributions of vertiports in urban areas are not conducive to UAM’s time saving effect. All clustering scenarios surpass the OBUAM scenario in the matter of enhancing accessibility. Excessive concentration of vertiports in urban areas does not contribute to improving accessibility. The K-means++ scenario offers the optimal solution in both regards