Vertiport Scheduling

Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) vehicles have gained immense popularity in the delivery drone market and are now being developed for passenger transportation in urban areas to enable Urban Air Mobility (UAM) efficiently. UAM aims to utilise urban airspace to address the problem of 
frequent and heavy road congestion in dense urban cities. VTOL vehicles require vertiport terminals for landing, take-off, refuelling (or charging), and maintenance. An efficient scheduling algorithm is essential to maximize the throughput of the vertiport terminal while maintaining safety protocols to 
handle the dense UAM traffic. While traditional departure and taxiing operations can be applied in the context of vertiport terminals, specific algorithms are required for take-off and landing schedules. Unlike traditional aircraft that require a runway and can fly in only one direction, VTOL 
vehicles can approach and climb from any direction. We formulated a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP) to schedule flights for taxiing and climbing in 
multiple directions after take-off. Our results show that increasing the number of climbing directions can reduce delays by over 50\%. We also study the fairness of the distribution of delays among the flights.