Urban Air Mobility (Coursera)

What You Will Learn
You will get an understanding of new mobility concepts and the influence of Urban Air Mobility on the whole transport system.

Syllabus

WEEK 1
Introduction - What is Urban Air Mobility?
This first course module gives an overview of all aspects that define "Urban Air Mobility". It explains the concept of Urban Air Mobiltiy as well as all crucial factors, such as vehicle and power train design, infrastructure and vertiport design, air traffic management, the ensuring of safety and airworthiness, sustainability, use cases and concept of operations, city integration and ground transport connection and political support and public acceptance. - Dr Kay Plötner (Bauhaus Luftfahrt Munich).

WEEK 2
Traffic Management for Urban Air Mobility
Dr. Bernd Korn (German Aerospace Center Braunschweig)

WEEK 3
Aviation Management
Decision makers at airports and airlines face many challenges and require effective decision support to deal with them appropriately. This gives rise to a variety of difficult and interesting problems. In this module, we will look at the three big classes, these problems fall into, and discuss general solution approaches that can be applied. /// Maximilian Moll’s research focuses on reinforcement learning, one of the three areas in machine learning. Here, his particular interest is on combinations with classical methods of operations research as well as application opportunities to prescriptive analytics. The latter pushes past predictive analytics, in the sense that it not only tries to predict the future, but tries to suggest optimal actions to be taken in the present.
He leads the research group “Data-driven Aviation Management” at Munich Aerospace and is leader of the working group “Simulation and Optimization of Complex Systems” of the German Society for Operations Research.

WEEK 4
Urban Air Mobility and Urban Planning
It is difficult to build safe and efficient Urban Air Mobility (UAM) vehicles. In addition, it will be equally challenging to integrate vertiports where UAM vehicles can take off and land in the urban fabric. While there are planning processes that allow to integrate vertiports in the transport and land use planning process, it is difficult to find available space in dense urban areas (where the demand will be particularly high), to gain public acceptance and to reduce negative impacts, such as noise, visual effects and safety issues. This module explains the common transport and land use planning processes that are required to build UAM vertiports. The integration with existing modes is discussed as well as the competition with existing modes. Induced demand is explained and simulation results are presented. // Professor Rolf Moeckel, Associate Professor (Travel Behavior) at Technical University of Munich since 2021; Rudolf Mößbauer Professorship from September 2015 until August 2021; Post-Doctoral Research at National Center for Smart Growth/University of Maryland, USA from August 2013 until August 2015; Doctorate at Institute of Spatial Planning/University of Dortmund, Germany from Julie 2002 until September 2006 (awarded with the 2007 University Dissertation Prize); Diploma at Department of Spatial Planning/University of Dortmund, Germany from October 1998 until August 2000 and from August 2001 until June 2002; Fulbright Scholar (Visiting Graduate Student) at University of Washington/Seattle, USA from September 2000 until July 2001.

WEEK 5
Understanding the Acceptance of Urban Air Mobility
In this course we will cover a range of topics related to the estimation of demand for future, unavailable modes, such as UAM. Topics like collecting user preferences via stated preference experiments and using the results of discrete choice models contribute to this. The concepts of user and societal acceptance are also introduced, along with practical examples of ways to assess and interpret them. // Constantinos Antoniou is a Full Professor in the Chair of Transportation Systems Engineering at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany. He holds a Diploma in Civil Engineering from NTUA (1995), a MS in Transportation (1997) and a PhD in Transportation Systems (2004), both from MIT. His research focuses on modelling and optimization of transportation systems, data analytics and machine learning for transportation systems.
Costas has a proven track record in attracting competitive funding in both national and international levels. He is/has been PI of several research projects (e.g. H2020 iDREAMS, MOMENTUM, Drive2thefuture, DFG DVanPool and Trampa). He has authored more than 400 scientific publications, including more than 150 papers in international, peer-reviewed journals, 250 in international conference proceedings, 3 books and 20 book chapters.

WEEK 6
Demand Modeling for Urban Air Mobility
This course describes different approaches and data used to model travel demand. An introduction to discrete choice models is provided. An example of demand prediction for an air taxi commuting service is provided. The example uses a discrete choice model and location-based data from a telecommunications company to predict demand in the 40 largest cities in the U.S. /// Dr. Laurie Garrow is an expert in air travel behavior and market analysis. She is a Professor and Co-Director of the Center for Urban and Regional Air Mobility at Georgia Tech and owner of Atlanta Analytics. She has more than 20 years of experience in aviation and previously worked at United Airlines.

WEEK 7
Economics of Urban Air Mobility
For many decades Urban Air Mobility (UAM) has been addressed through the use of conventional helicopters. However, the emergence of eVTOL vehicles signals that UAM is on the verge of radical transformation regarding its scale of operation, mainly due to reduced noise pollution and an improved cost structure. This module discusses some of the economic conditions (cost, demand, finance) that must be met for market viability of eVTOL vehicles in passenger transportation networks. // Humberto Bettini is Professor at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. He is a B.S. and Ph.D. in Economics, and a M.Sc. in Transportation Engineering. He teaches Cost Accounting, Principles of Economics and Microeconomics, while his research concentrates on competitive and innovative aspects of air transportation and the airline industry.