Virtual City Based eVTOL Vertiport Placement Planning

This paper constructs an electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) vertiport placement model and conducts a placement study based on a virtual city. The study establishes a virtual city consisting of an n * n grid of equally sized square cells, where each grid represents a candidate location for a vertiport. Different sets of these grids form administrative regions, and different data, such as GDP and population, are assigned to these regions. The article also outlines the rules for calculating the distances between vertiports. With reference to data from a specific city, the study uses a value of n equal to 6 for the case study. Furthermore, the article establishes an eVTOL vertiport placement model that identifies potential passengers for eVTOL commuting based on individual GDP data. The objective function is to maximise the time saved by potential passengers commuting by eVTOL compared to commuting by car in the commuter network. The optimisation process uses the branch-and-bound method. By investigating different placement strategies in the virtual city, the study demonstrates the reliability of the results for eVTOL vertiport placement planning based on the virtual city.