Nikolas Hohmann, Sebastian Brulin, Jürgen Adamy, Markus Olhofer, "Multi-objective Optimization of Urban Air Transportation Networks under Social Considerations", IEEE Open Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems, vol. 5, pp. 589 - 602, 2024.

The growing urbanization and traffic density in cities call for efficient transportation solutions. One potential solution extends urban traffic into the airspace, requiring some kind of aerial infrastructure. This work addresses the problem of optimizing an aerial traffic network regarding multiple objectives. Given logistic hub positions and a set of optimized paths between them, we aim for a Pareto-optimal air corridor network structure. Therefore, we propose a Path-merging strategy to create a graph representation of the initial traffic network and then thin it out in a subsequent Network Optimization step. When designing an aerial traffic network, it is crucial to consider the needs of city residents, in addition to economic considerations such as travel time and maintenance costs. Therefore, we include social requirements such as noise pollution as objective functions in the optimization process. This results in a set of three-dimensional transport networks that balance different trade-offs between the defined objectives. We then examine how the social acceptance rate and the economic demands of an aerial traffic network are related by analyzing the extra costs associated with more social networks. To illustrate this, we present a case study of an aerial traffic network in Frankfurt, Germany.