Smart Urban Mobility Laboratory (SUM-Lab)
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Highlighted Research in Advanced Air 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. 
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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.
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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 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.​

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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.  
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Lab News:

Dr. Yu Yu Zhang delivered a presentation at 2025 Florida CTST Mega Meeting, titled "​DARTS: Drone-Based AI-Powered Real-Time Traffic Incident Detection System" on May 8th, 2025. 

Dr. Yu Yu Zhang has been advanced to grade of Senior Member with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. 

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Dr. Yu Yu Zhang delivered a Florida LTAP Webinar titled "Advanced Air Mobility in Florida: Plan for the New Era of Integrated Multimodal Transportation System" on April 29, 2025. The LTPA session attracted about 250 registered audience. Visit https://floridaltap.org/ for the recorded webinar
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At the 2025 TRB Annual Meeting. the Best Paper Award from Transportation Research Board Standing Committee of Intelligent Transportation System was awarded to Drs. Yu Yu Zhang, Bai Li and Achilleas Kourtellis for the paper entitled, “DARTS: Drone-Based AI-Powered Real-Time Traffic Incident Detection System.”

Two papers from SUM-Lab are accepted to be presented at 2025 TRB Annual Meeting. 1. DARTS: Drone-Based AI-Powered Real-Time Traffic Incident Detection System; 2. Incorporating Emerging Advanced Air Mobility in Transportation Planning. Short Summary

Drs. Yu Zhang and Bai Li attended 2024 INFORMS Meeting held in Seattle on Oct. 20-23 and presented "Evaluating the Performance of Advanced Air Mobility System with an Anylogic Simulation Tool".

Dr. Bai Li attended 2024 FAA Drone/AAM Symposium, held at the Baltimore Convention Center in Maryland from July 30 to August 1, 2024.  

Dr. Yu Yu Zhang attended USF-TPA Partnership Discussion meeting held at TPA on August 9, 2024. 
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Dr. Yu Yu Zhang is invited to serve on the FDOT Advanced Air Mobility Advisory Committee (AAMAC) and attended the first committee meeting at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood Airport on Nov. 30, 2023. 
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Visit "Professional Activities" for archived news of SUM-Lab. ​

Affiliated with:


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FAA National Center of Excellence 
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USDOT Tier 1 University Transportation Center
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 USDOT National University Transportation Center

Research Sponsors 


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Contact us:

Mailing Address: 4202 E. Fowler Ave. ENG030, Tampa, FL 33620, USA
Email Address: yuzhang at usf.edu
@ Copyright 2008 SUM-Lab