Transportation System Modeling and Simulation Lab (TranSMS Lab)

Highlighted Research in Advanced Air Mobility
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. SUM-Lab has conducted research on AAM planning (vertiport locations and demand estimation), infrastructure system development (Digital twin and Agentic AI-driven vertiport management system), safe and efficient integrated airspace (corridor network design, automated flight planning, scheduling, integrated passenger assignment, departure scheduling, and eVTOL rebalancing). SUM-Lab also developed simulation platform for AAM network and service (AAMSim) and integration of AAM at commercial airports (AirFieldSim).

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 fairness among operators into consideration. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trc.2021.103324.

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Patents and Awards Highlights

Congratulations to Yu Zhang, PhD and Hualong Tang, PhD for US Patent 12,614,467 issued on April 28, 2026 titled "System and Method for Automated Flight Planning for Urban Air Mobility".

Congratulations to Yu Zhang, PhD and Yuan Wang, PhD for the US Patent 12,288,149 B1 issued on April 29, 2025 titled "System and Method for the Prediction of Runway Configuration and Airport Acceptance Rate (AAR) for Multi-Airport System".

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

Congratulations to Tingting Zhao, PhD, and Yu Zhang, PhD, 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.