Skyports Infrastructure and its research partner Cranfield University have developed the world’s first vertiport Fast-Time Simulation. The simulation project is part of Skyports and Cranfield’s work on the Advanced Mobility Ecosystem Consortium, the UK Innovate funded advanced air mobility project aimed at launching the next generation of aviation. The project draws on work from the consortium’s partners: NATS for airspace, Connected Places Catapult for demand, and Vertical Aerospace for aircraft processes, and acts as a resource for both industry and academia to advance research and development of AAM.
The simulation, which has been developed over the last year, uses CAST by ARC, a leading software for airport simulation. The technology enables Skyports and Cranfield to simulate and visualise critical vertiport processes, with the learnings being fed back into Skyports’ working assumptions and models.
What is a Fast-Time Simulation?
A Fast-Time Simulation (FTS) is a method for evaluation and decision making. It is used in aerospace and aviation as a cost-effective and efficient way to assess and establish critical processes across the aviation ecosystem. This includes:
- Evaluating the impact of new technologies, concepts and operational procedures
- Visualising processes as they relate to airspace, airport operations and airfield layouts
- Assessing capacity and resourcing at our vertiports
- Reducing conflicts on the ground and in the airspace which may result in delays
Why use simulation?
Advanced air mobility is not commercially operational – yet. In the absence of commercial operations, there are two primary ways in which to gather data: experiments and simulation.
Both are important and form the basis of the work that Skyports does in the area of research and development. One example is an experiment campaign we conducted at the Skyports European Vertiport Testbed at the Pontoise-Cormeilles airfield in Paris in autumn 2023. This phase of experiments enabled us to make confident statements about processes and parameters relating to the passenger journey through a vertiport (for more info, read A proving ground for vertiport operations: Real-life data collection at Skyports Infrastructure’s European vertiport testbed).
The insights we gain from experiments are fed into our CAST FTS, where we can model environments and variations which would be much too complex and costly to do through real-life experiments. While simulation is an abstraction of reality, we scrutinise our models to represent the driving features of our future vertiports. In this way we can learn valuable lessons today, more than a year before our first vertiport at Dubai International Airport will go live.
The design and development of airports follows a well established, tried and tested pathway. Resources such as the IATA Airport Development Reference Manual provide best practice guidance used globally by airport planners, architects, engineers and airport authorities for the development of airports.
In the early days of vertiport development, the AAM industry also made use of these same resources. However, while they work as a good foundation upon which to base our learnings, we have diverged from use of airport-specific guidance in favour of bespoke, vertiport-specific development. The reasons are two-fold: first, the empirical insights are given for airports, not vertiports – and vertiports are a new type of facility, not just small airports. And second, as the volume of passengers will be much smaller at a single vertiport, decisions of individual passengers have a larger impact. Only FTS is truly capable of capturing these dynamics and is for this reason the state-of-the-art approach for transport simulation and our method of choice.
What do we simulate?
In short, our CAST scenario is a digital twin, or a simplified version of the real world in a virtual world. This includes FATOs, stands, taxiways, passenger terminal, etc. As we run a simulation, the arrival and departure of aircraft and passengers is determined by a schedule. Once in the simulation, each passenger makes autonomous decisions based on pre-defined rules. For example, if one check-in desk has a long lane, he will go to the second desk. This allows us to simulate an entire day of operations including every little interaction and micro-decision.
It is worth mentioning that ARC is developing new features and modules to their software, as we stretch CAST’s capabilities. Two examples are the implementation of electric energy and chargers instead of conventional fuel, and the exploration of simulating multiple vertiports within a network without compromising any level of detail of the individual vertiports. One can imagine the high demand on computational power.
What are the benefits?
We believe in the reality and value of AAM, but we are also keenly aware that this new mode of transport is not well understood and needs to be operated very efficiently to create profitable business models.
Our CAST simulation addresses both of these considerations. We are shedding light on the variables and processes that can happen on a vertiport, starting from small interactions all the way up to system-level dynamics. This research accelerates our understanding of vertiport design and operations substantially and the resulting learnings enable us to optimise processes by simulating hundreds of operational variations and finding the best performing set of procedures.
Ultimately, CAST will inform business and operational decisions. But academia also benefits from our shared efforts as high-quality publications are currently in the making and new research questions will be highlighted.
