Urban air taxi (UAT) operation has gained traction with the advancements in distributed electric propulsion and the emergence of electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft. Start-up companies and aircraft manufacturers are pursuing the possibility of operating UAT at scale in urban and suburban areas and at an affordable price. However, considerable uncertainties remain about several strategic, tactical, and operational aspects that affect UAT adoption. We envision a mature state of UAT operation in which the UAT operator offers door-to-door, multimodal, on-demand, and per-seat service. We propose the concept of flexible meeting points for UAT operation where passengers are flexible about the location of the UAT pads for boarding and deboarding, and could therefore be pooled together to share an aircraft. Consequently, we model UAT fleet operation as a capacitated location-allocation-routing problem with time windows and present a mixed integer programming formulation. The formulation addresses decisions on request acceptance and rejection, allocation of requests to flights, and aircraft routing and scheduling. Additionally, it allows for consolidating the demand to increase the aircraft’s utilization and service rate. The numerical results indicate that the demand consolidation scheme could significantly decrease the number of rejected requests and the aerial mileage. Depending on the operator’s business model, the proposed formulation could be used offline in a static and deterministic setting when all requests are known in advance, or it could be employed online by sequentially solving the static and deterministic snapshot problems with no knowledge about future requests.

随着分布式电动推进技术的发展以及电动垂直起降飞机的出现，城市空中滑行（UAT）的运营受到了关注。初创公司和飞机制造商正在寻求以合理的价格在城市和郊区大规模运行UAT的可能性。但是，影响UAT采用的几个战略，战术和运营方面仍然存在很大的不确定性。我们设想UAT运行的成熟状态，其中UAT运营商提供门到门，多式联运，按需和按座位服务。我们提出了UAT操作的灵活集合点的概念，其中乘客可以灵活选择用于登机和登机的UAT垫的位置，因此可以集合起来共享一架飞机。最后，我们将UAT机队运营建模为带有时间窗的受限位置分配路由问题，并提出了混合整数规划公式。该表述解决了有关请求接受和拒绝，对飞行的请求分配以及飞机路线和调度的决定。另外，它允许合并需求以提高飞机的利用率和服务率。数值结果表明，需求合并方案可以显着减少被拒绝的请求数量和飞行里程。根据运营商的业务模式，当预先知道所有请求时，可以在静态和确定性设置中离线使用建议的公式，