Demand Capacity Balancing at Vertiports: A Pending Slot Technique to Accommodate On-Demand Urban Air Mobility Operations

Urban air mobility (UAM) differs from air traffic management (ATM) in that it offers a more balanced mix of scheduled and on-demand transportation services. Therefore, adopting First-requested, first-served (FRFS) demand capacity balancing (DCB) commonly used in ATM can lead to excessive delays for on-demand UAM services due to the shorter lead time between flight plan submission and takeoff. To address this, we propose a novel DCB technique that introduces pending slots that are reserved for on-demand services, as well as slot scheduling algorithms that dynamically manage pending slots based on real-time traffic conditions. Numerical simulations in various traffic scenarios show that the proposed DCB technique improves fairness in delay distribution and overall network efficiency compared to the FRFS DCB technique.