Study of emerging air taxi network operation using discrete-event systems simulation approach

This research focuses on understanding the air taxi operations to determine the number of air taxis required to fulfill the demand for urban air mobility in New York City (NYC). We leverage the Define, Measure, Analyze, Design, and Verify (DMADV) framework and integrate it with the systems simulation approach. Upon investigation, we find that all the parameters linearly impact the vehicle utilization, while other measures are robust, specifically with respect to the seating capacity. It is also recommended to operate initially with 70 air taxis in NYC to achieve a trade-off between customer wait time and vehicle utilization. The proposed approach can act as a recommender system for air taxi companies.