Operations and Management of Integrated Air Transportation Systems

Abstract

This seminar presents an integrated perspective on low-altitude air mobility (LAM) in urban air–ground transportation systems, with a particular focus on passenger preferences and the planning and operation of LAM networks. It first assesses residents’ willingness to adopt LAM through a stated-preference survey and discrete choice modelling, identifying the key determinants of travellers’ mode choice. It then develops a network planning and design framework for integrated air–ground systems to examine how strategic and operational decisions—such as vertiport location and capacity, service frequency and allocation, pricing policies, and boundary/terminal control measures—shape demand distribution across modes and corridors. The analysis explicitly accounts for congestion externalities and the potential consequences of interventions arising from interactions between the air and ground layers under varying traffic and demand conditions. Overall, the study offers generalisable insights to support the planning, regulation, and phased deployment of integrated LAM in complex urban environments, with the goals of improving accessibility, managing congestion impacts, and enhancing system robustness.

Speaker

Dr Zhuoye Zhang is a Research Associate in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He received his BEng in Transportation Engineering from Tongji University, his MEng from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and his PhD in Industrial Engineering from The University of Hong Kong. He was a visiting student at University College London in 2019 and at the University of Michigan in 2024.

His research addresses both fundamental and emerging challenges in transportation, with particular interests in shared and automated mobility management, air transportation and air–ground integrated operations, and the modelling and optimisation of multimodal transportation systems. His work has been published in leading journals and conferences, including Transportation Research Part A/B/C/E, the International Symposium on Transportation and Traffic Theory (ISTTT), and the Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting. He has received the Best Paper Awards from the 14th and 16th Workshops on Computational Transportation Science (CTS) and the 5th Frontier Symposium on Traffic Behavior and Transportation Science (TBTS 2024), as well as the Chu Tsun Hong Scholarship for Outstanding Research Achievement (Department of Data and Systems Engineering, The University of Hong Kong) and a Nomination Award for the Qian Xuesen Urban Science Gold Award.