Urban Air Mobility ROPE Table: A Decomposition Tool to Identify and Organize Potential Operational Limits

<p>Understanding the operational limits in the Urban Air Mobility (UAM) market and their interdependence with potential new technologies is important to enhance the evolution of UAM. This paper summarizes and exemplifies means to identify and organize operational limits, followed by translation to analysis of their impact  on the Urban Air Mobility system of systems. The work builds upon a previous computational framework developed by the authors to assess the mobility benefits from Conventional Take-Off and Landing (CTOL) and Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) operations at a regional transportation level, with “hooks” into urban areas. Operational limits are explored via an assessment of various factors using the Resources, Operations, Policies, Economics (ROPE) table methodology. Demonstration cases explore operational limits from individual and community level perspectives in the Chicago Metropolitan Area. Operational limits from individual perspectives discuss the impact of peak traffic conditions, the impact of UAM-Port infrastructures, and the impact of ride sharing coupled with waiting time on the total effective cost of a commuting trip per commuter; whereas, operational limits from a community perspective discuss the impact of ground traffic congestion speed on the UAM-Port location and the impact of UAM-Port topologies and operational conditions on UAM-Port operations. </p>