Configuration Analysis on Two-Pad Vertiport Capacity Using Discrete Event Simulation

A vertiport is a key supporting infrastructure for providing takeoff and landing facilities for aircraft within the rapidly growing Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) ecosystem, particularly in urban areas or Urban Air Mobility (UAM) which faces significant challenges such as dense urban obstacles and limited available space, urging improvement in the vertiport space usage. The configuration variation on a two-pad vertiport is modeled and simulated using AnyLogic Discrete Event Simulation (DES), varying number of stands, operational concepts, and aircraft turnaround times, while considering Linear and Satellite topology to analyze their influence on the vertiport output capacity. The results indicate that each configuration responds differently with turnaround time variation, showing delays and capacity reduction for shorter time. Increasing number of stands provides a significant capacity benefit for longer turnaround times across all simulated configurations, with capacity gains ranging from 100–120%. Overall, the linear–independent vertiport achieves the highest total capacity of 163 and 229 aircraft for the 4 and 6 stand variants, respectively, while the satellite vertiport attains the highest total capacity of 266 and 299 aircraft for the 8 and 10 stand variants. However, considering urban space usage, the satellite vertiport benefits in lower stands number while linear vertiport benefits in higher stands number.