Highlighted Research in Advanced Aerial Mobility 
Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is an emerging concept proposed in recent years by utilizing electric vertical take-off and landing vehicles (eVTOLs), which is expected to offer an alternative way of transporting passengers and goods in urban areas with significantly improved mobility by making use of low-altitude airspace. Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) moves people and cargo between places previously not served or underserved by aviation – local, regional, intraregional, urban – using revolutionary new aircraft, information technologies, and CNSI in low altitude airspace. 
This study examines the network design of UAM on-demand service, with a particular focus on the use of integer programming and a solution algorithm to determine the optimal locations of vertiports, user allocation to vertiports (demand estimation), and vertiport access- and egress-mode choices while considering the interactions between vertiport locations and potential UAM travel demand. ​https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eng.2020.11.007.
We propose an Automated Flight Planning System (AFPS) that could be employed by PSUs. In the AFPS, a Low-Altitude Airspace Management System (LAMS) is proposed to automatically generate a route network with the capability of avoiding obstacles and obstructions in low-altitude airspace. Given the requests of flight operations, i.e., origin, destination, departure time, the Low-Altitude Traffic Management System (LTMS) will design pre-departure conflict-free 4D trajectories and provide flexibilities of en-route maneuvering by taking system cost and equity among operators into consideration. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trc.2021.103324.
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​Director:
​Yu Zhang, PhD
Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Center for Urban Transportation Research
University of South Florida
4202 E. Fowler Ave. ENB118
Tampa, FL 33620, USA
813-974-5846
yuzhang at usf.edu

Lab News:
Dr. Yu Zhang presented "Automated Pre-Departure Flight Planning for High-Density Advanced Air Mobility" at the 32nd INFORMS Annual Meeting held at Indianapolis on Oct. 17, 2022. 
 
Dr. Yu Zhang was invited to give a talk titled "Advanced Air Mobility Research at USF" at the PacTrans Annual Conference held at University of Washington on Oct. 14, 2022.

Dr. Yu Zhang co-organized the FAA ANG System Analysis/NEXTOR Machine Learning Workshop held virtually on June 13, 2022. Dr Zhang presented the joint work with her former PhD student, Yuan Wang "Prediction of Runway Configurations and Airport Acceptance Rates for Multi-Airport System Using Gridded Weather Forecast". More than 100 FAA employees and contractors attended the workshop. 

Congratulations to Dr. Tingting Zhao and Dr. Yu Zhang for the US Patent 11,321,648 issued on May 3rd, 2022 about a comprehensive method to categorize and plan restoration of key transportation infrastructure after natural disaster.  

Dr. Yu Zhang delivered two presentations in 7th UTC Southeast Regional Conference held at Boca Raton on March 24-25, 2022. One is "Automated Flight Planning of  High-density Urban Air Mobility" and the other is "ACES Transportation - From Micro-vehicles Serving Short Trips to eVTOLs Serving Long Trips".

Dr. Yu Zhang's study "Design of Automated Advanced Air Mobility Flight Planning System" (co-PI: Hualong Tang) received Amazon Research Awards 2021. https://www.amazon.science/research-awards/program-updates/2020-amazon-research-awards-recipients-announced  

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