A Comprehensive eVTOL Performance

Evaluation Framework in Urban Air Mobility

Mrinmoy Sarkar1 , Xuyang Yan1 Abenezer Girma1 , and Abdollah Homaifar1

North Carolina A&T State University, 1601 East Market Street, Greensboro, NC,
27401, USA,
[email protected], [email protected],
[email protected], [email protected]

Abstract. In this paper, we developed an open-source simulation frame-

work for the evaluation of electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles
(eVTOLs) in the context of Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) and
under the concept of Urban Air Mobility (UAM). Unlike most existing
studies, the proposed framework combines the utilization of UTM and
eVTOLs to develop a realistic UAM testing platform. For this purpose,
we first develop an UTM simulator to simulate the real-world UAM
environment. Then, instead of using a simplified eVOTL model, a high-
fidelity eVTOL design tool, namely SUAVE, is employed and an dilation
sub-module is introduced to bridge the gap between the UTM simula-
tor and SUAVE eVTOL performance evaluation tool to elaborate the
complete mission profile. Based on the developed simulation framework,
experiments are conducted and the results are presented to analyze the
performance of eVTOLs in the UAM environment.

Keywords: UAM, UTM, eVTOL, Simulation Framework

1 Terminology

UAM = Urban Air Mobility

eVTOL = Electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing Aircraft
UTM = Unmanned Traffic Management
SUAVE = Stanford University Aerospace Vehicle Environment
AGL = Above Ground Level

2 Introduction

In 2019, NASA initiated the “Urban Air Mobility” concept to utilize the three-
dimensional airspace to accommodate the heavy demand for cargo deliveries as
well as passenger transportation in urban areas 1 . The electric Vertical Takeoff
1
https://www.nasa.gov/uam-overview/
2 Mrinmoy Sarkar et al.

and Landing (eVTOL)2 aircraft is proposed as a promising solution to imple-

ment UAM in the future. Under this direction, different types of eVTOL have
been extensively investigated by researchers from the industry such as Uber,
Joby Aviation and Boeing. It is envisioned that eVTOLs will significantly re-
duce the heavy traffic congestion during peak times and improve the efficiency
of urban traffic networks.
The safety and reliability of UAM have motivated extensive research works
for both design and evaluation of UAM and eVTOLs. In [1, 8, 9, 12, 18, 21, 15,
16], the authors primarily focused on developing different algorithms or strate-
gies for the management of UAM with respect to different objectives. However,
no systematic approach is available to generate all possible strategies for UAM
purpose. Also, most of these UTM algorithms are evaluated in different simula-
tion interfaces and no common platform is yet developed for their evaluations.
Considering these challenges, a preliminary framework with metrics and a simu-
lation interface was developed to compare and evaluate different alternatives for
UAM in [13]. However, it simplified eVTOL operations from 3-D to 2-D space
and ignored the physical configuration, or properties of the eVTOL’s geometry,
weight, propulsion system, and battery configuration. From this aspect, most of
the existing UTM simulation interface are not realistic due to the fact that most
physical or aerodynamic factors are ignored. Moreover, the preliminary frame-
work did not consider the real-world mission profiles of eVTOL, and thus cannot
effectively model their behaviors in real-world scenarios. Therefore, this type of
simulator is efficient for high scale (large number of vehicles) eVTOL simulation
but not suitable for high fidelity (complex eVTOL model) simulation.
In contrast, the open-source conceptual design tool, namely SUAVE [10], is
capable of modeling the physical properties of eVTOLs (high fidelity model) and
incorporating the practical mission profile of eVTOLs. In [4], SUAVE is used to
optimize the design of eVTOLs by identifying the relationship between vehicle
configurations and performance without considering the interactions with other
eVTOLs in UAM. However, in real-world scenarios, the operational environment
of eVTOLs is dense and interaction from other eVTOLs must be considered.
Therefore, SUAVE has the limitation of high scale collaborative simulation. In
summary, several limitations of the existing studies of UAM and eVOTLs are as
follows:

– According to authors’ knowledge, no prior work has developed a UTM sim-

ulation framework for the evaluation of eVTOLs in a fully-realized UAM
environment. More specifically, current UTM simulators either have limited
access or ignore the physical properties of the eVTOLs.
– The trade-off between fidelity and scale is not considered in the existing UTM
simulation frameworks; High fidelity takes a longer time with poor scalability
while low fidelity may ignore infeasible missions with better scalability.

2
“AHS International Leads Transformative Vertical Flight Initiative”. evtol.news.
Retrieved 2020-09-23.
 eVTOL Performance Evaluation 3

– Existing testing and design tools of eVTOLs rarely consider the complexity
of the operational environment caused by the interactions among different
eVTOLs in UAM and have limited scalablility.
In light of these limitations, we develop an effective framework to evalu-
ate the performance of eVTOLs in UAM. The proposed framework can both
simulate the interactions of eVTOLs in a highly congested UAM network and
evaluate the performance of a high fidelity eVTOL model. With a low-fidelity
UTM simulator, the proposed framework can provide detailed analysis to iden-
tify and explain infeasible mission profiles. The primary contributions of this
work are two-fold: First, we developed an open source simulation framework by
utilizing open source UTM simulator from [13] and the SUAVE tool to develop
a more comprehensive evaluation framework for eVTOLs. Second, we conduct
simulations using the developed framework and present the simulation results
to analyze the performance of eVTOLs in a UAM network.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: Section 3 provides a
review of different research studies in UTM and eVTOL testing. The details of
the proposed framework are described in Section 5. Section 6 presents experi-
mental studies using the proposed framework. The advantages of the proposed
framework are summarized in Section 7. Finally, concluding remarks and future
work are outlined in Section 8.

3 Literature Review
The demand for a new air traffic management system to coordinate increasingly
dense low-altitude flights has recently attracted substantial research [1, 8, 12, 18,
21, 3]. Most of these research studies propose different air-traffic management
methods and develop the testing tools to evaluate the effectiveness of aerial
vehicle (such as eVTOL) designs under different flight profiles and objectives.
In this section, we review those studies and identify gaps to motivate a more
realistic aerial vehicle testing and evaluation framework.
UTM Simulation Framework for UAM: A systematic approach to gen-
erate all viable architectures, as required by a thorough decision-making process,
is still under development. Some architectures are still at the Concept of Oper-
ations (ConOps) stage and have not been thoroughly evaluated. Although some
other architectures have been tested in simulation environments, each approach
is tested with a distinct simulator and some simulators are closed-source. This
makes the evaluation and comparison of the architectures difficult. For instance,
architectures such as Full Mix, Layers, Zones, and Tubes, are developed using
the TMX simulator [2], while the Iowa UTM [21] and Altiscope [14] architectures
utilize a custom 2D simulator. Moreover, DLR Delivery Network [12], Linköping
distributed [17] and Linköping centralized [17] architectures are built on a cus-
tom 3D simulator.
To address these gaps and design a better decision-making process for UTM,
recent work in [13] has proposed an open-source simulation framework that can
generate various alternatives for different UTM subsystems. In addition, the
4 Mrinmoy Sarkar et al.

framework can compare alternatives based on safety, efficiency, and capacity.

The framework consists of four elements: system decomposition, alternative gen-
eration, comparison metric establishment, and alternative evaluations. To create
general alternatives for the conceptual design, the author decomposed the UTM
system into four subsystems: airspace structure, access control, preflight plan-
ning, and collision avoidance.
The author used a custom-built open-source 2D agent-based simulation
framework to generate and evaluate alternatives. Each agent is a representation
of an eVTOL. However, the 2D simulation framework fails to capture important
factors of a real-world environment, including the agent’s altitude and wind con-
dition. Additionally, the agents are modeled as 2D points in the simulator, and
the vehicle’s geometry and dynamics are ignored, which hinders the practicality
of the simulator for modeling real-world scenarios. In the real-world environment,
the physical design of the vehicles plays an important role in studying the effect
of aerodynamics, airspace capacity, weather, and other factors. Moreover, it is
assumed that the vehicles stay at the same altitude throughout the flight and a
simple 2D approach is used for the modeling. Accordingly, the take-off and the
landing procedures are completely ignored by the study. This simplification re-
duces the framework’s complexity by omitting one of the essential components of
the overall flight process where there are numerous uncertainties and challenges.
Once the agents are granted access to the airspace, each agent optimizes their
own trajectory using either the decoupled method, safe interval path planning,
or local path planning. The collision avoidance system is implemented using a
reactive, decentralized strategy called Modified Voltage Potential (MVP) [5, 6].
Finally, the UTM’s performance is evaluated based on the established metrics
such as efficiency, safety and capacity [13].

Departure Procedure Cruise Arrival Procedure

Altitude (ft)

1500
b m
Cli

Transition Descend
Accel Climb
on
siti

300
Decel Descend
n
Tra

50
Hover Climb Hover Descend
Mission Range

Fig. 1. A generalized eVTOL mission profile for UAM application [19].

eVTOL Design and Performance Analysis Tool : In [4], a method

is proposed for testing different types of eVTOL designs in accomplishing a
given mission profile. It uses SUAVE [10] to achieve a realistic design of various
 eVTOL Performance Evaluation 5

types of aircraft configurations with varying aerodynamic fidelity analyses. After

designing and optimizing the eVTOLs in SUAVE, each vehicle is tested with
a static mission profile. As shown in Figure 1, the mission profile starts with
an initial take-off and it is followed by the ascent, cruise, descent, and reserve
hover/loiter. Based on a fixed mission profile the performance of different eVTOL
designs is evaluated.
Despite the fact that the study in [4] considers the testing of different high
fidelity eVTOL designs, it fails to investigate the effect of different dynamic mis-
sion profiles on the performance of the eVTOL. In a real-world scenario, the
eVTOL should be robust enough to follow different mission profiles generated
based on various environmental conditions and circumstances. However, [4] con-
sidered a fixed mission profile where the eVTOL follows a pre-defined mission
with a fixed amount of flight time and a constant altitude. Under congested low-
altitude UAM conditions, the speed of the eVTOL can be affected by different
internal and environmental factors, such as eVTOL payloads, weather condi-
tions, and collision avoidance system. The author also assumes a collision-free
path, which is an impractical assumption.

Table 1. Comparison of studies in literature.

UTM
Features SUAVE [4] Proposed
Simulator[13]
Comprehensive UAM simulation environment ✓ × ✓
High fidelity eVTOL dynamics and configuration × ✓ ✓
Dynamic mission profile ✓ × ✓
Evaluate each segment of the mission profile × ✓ ✓
Can test new novel eVTOL aircraft × ✓ ✓

In this paper, we aim to address these gaps. We propose an eVTOL perfor-

mance evaluation framework that leverages the advantages of the comprehensive
UTM simulator from [13, 5, 10] and a high fidelity eVTOL design and flight pro-
filing tool from [4, 10]. In Table 1, we summarized the features of the existing
UTM simulation framework and eVTOL performance analysis tool with the pro-
posed simulation framework.

4 Problem Statement

Given a UAM environment with all the infrastructures such as Unmanned traffic
management (UTM) system, vertiport terminal procedures, flight planning algo-
rithms, obstacle avoidance algorithms, or other autonomous capabilities for an
eVTOL operation, our goal is to measure the performance of an high fidelity eV-
TOL model quantitatively for different mission profiles such as Throttle profile,
Battery energy profile, Battery voltage profile, and C-Rating profile in different
segment of the mission profile.
6 Mrinmoy Sarkar et al.

5 Proposed Framework
As described in Sections 2 and 3, the existing studies provide UTM and eVTOL
performance evaluation independently. Nevertheless, the concept of UAM can
be only fully realized when UTM and eVTOL performance evaluations are inte-
grated. In this paper, we combined these two different performance evaluation
schemes and developed a new simulation framework. With this new framework,
we can analyze the limitations and strengths of any UTM algorithm or realistic
eVTOL model within a UAM environment. Besides, the proposed framework is
an open-source simulation platform that allows for public research purpose. The
system architecture of the proposed simulation framework is shown in Figure
2. It consists of three sub-modules: (1) UTM Simulator, (2) Dilation, and (3)
eVTOL Performance Evaluator. Details of each sub-module are described in the
following sub-sections.

UTM Simulator
eVTOL Performance Evaluator
System Decomposition
Airspace structure
SUAVE
Dilation
Access control High fidelity eVTOL model
Generate full mission profile Execute a performance
Preflight planning
Add terminal area procedures in the front evaluation of the given
Collision avoidance full mission profiles
and end of 2D cruise segments
Add altitudes to the 2D cruise trajectories
Evaluate different UTM algorithms according to the mission requirements
Output
2D low fidelity eVTOL air traffic simulation
Throttle profiles
Output Battery Voltage profiles
Output 3D full mission profile of each eVTOL Battery Energy profiles
2D trajectories of all the eVTOLs during the C-Rating profiles
cruise segment of the mission profile

Fig. 2. The architecture of the proposed simulation framework.

5.1 UTM Simulator

The UTM Simulator is developed by adapting the open source implementation of
the UTM simulation framework from [13]. It uses off-the-shelf implementations
of the airspace structure, access control, preflight planning, and collision avoid-
ance algorithms. We modify the visualization tool of the original implementation
to simulate the real-world UTM systems and extract the entire trajectory of each
agent/eVTOL. This new feature provides more details about the behaviors of
eVTOLs at different time intervals during the overall mission. Since the original
implementation of the UTM simulator in [13] ignores vertiport 3 terminal area
procedures (Standard Instrument Departures (SIDs), Standard Instrument Ar-
rivals (STARs) and Approaches etc.) by focusing only on the cruise segment of
the entire flight profile, we extract only the 2D trajectory of the cruise segment
in our UTM simulator sub-module. Thus, the output of the UTM simulator in
3
A type of airport for aircrafts which take off and land vertically.
 eVTOL Performance Evaluation 7

our framework is a set of 2D trajectories of all the eVTOLs in the simulation,

which enter the airspace at a specific time and finish an entire flight. Each entry
of the 2D trajectory is composed of five elements: x-coordinate, y-coordinate,
vx -velocity, vy -velocity, and time-stamp.

5.2 Dilation
We elaborate the cruise segment with other required segments such as takeoff,
transition, climb, descent and land in the dilation sub-module. Accordingly, the
output of the dilation algorithm is a full mission profile of each eVTOL. More-
over, we convert the trajectories into 3D trajectories by incorporating altitudes
for all the entries in the 2D trajectories. The algorithmic description of the di-
lation sub-module is shown in algorithm 1. Though real-world implementation
of vertiport terminal area procedures requires further investigation, the Hover
Climb, Transition Climb, Departure Terminal area Procedures, Arrival Termi-
nal area Procedures, Transition Descend and Hover Descend segments in the
dilation algorithm can be inferred as vertiport terminal area procedures.

Algorithm 1 Creation of Full Mission profiles for each eVTOL

Input: 2D Trajectories generated from UTM Simulator
Output: 3D Trajectories with initial and ending segments of the mission profile
ζ⇐∅
N ⇐ Number of 2D Trajectories
for i = 1 to N do
τ ⇐∅
Append Hover Climb Segment to τ
Append Transition Climb Segment to τ
Append Departure Terminal area Procedures Segment to τ
Append Accelerated Climb Segment to τ
Insert a constant altitude to each waypoint of the ith 2D Trajectory
Append the ith 3D Trajectory as the Cruise Segment to τ
Append Decelerated Descend Segment to τ
Append Arrival Terminal area Procedures Segment to τ
Append Transition Descend Segment to τ
Append Hover Descend Segment to τ
Append τ to ζ
end for
return ζ

5.3 Performance Evaluation

To evaluate the performance of each eVTOL in the UAM environment, we use
the open-source software SUAVE [20, 11]. SUAVE is a set of tools to design
and optimize conceptual novel aircraft. As an example, we used an eVTOL
8 Mrinmoy Sarkar et al.

model developed in SUAVE. The elaborated mission profiles generated by the

dilation sub-module are used in SUAVE to evaluate the performance of the eV-
TOL model. There are several evaluation criteria, however, four built-in metrics,
including Throttle profile, Battery energy profile, Battery voltage profile, and
C-Rating profile, are employed to evaluate the performance of the eVTOL for
all the mission profiles. The metrics are described as follows:

Throttle profile In general, the throttle controls the vertical motion of an eVTOL
and this measurement is directly proportional to the thrust generated from its
motors. From the throttle profile, the amount of thrust contribution from each
motor during different segments of the mission profile are obtained.

Battery Voltage profile Using the battery voltage profile, we can observe the
decreasing trend of battery voltage for the eVTOL as the mission progresses.

Battery Energy profile : This profile shows the battery energy consumption by
the eVTOL along the mission profile. It is an important metric for eVTOL per-
formance measurement because battery energy consumption is directly related
to the range of the mission that can be achieved by the eVTOL.

C-Rating profile The C-Rating profile shows the battery discharge rate of the
eVTOL for the given mission profile.

6 Results
We present our results from the proposed eVTOL performance measurement
framework and those details are discussed below4 .

Table 2. List of parameters used for the UTM simulator

Parameter name Value

Operational area 50 × 50 km2
Minimum separation 500 m
Sensing radius 5000 m
Max speed of the eVTOL 100.662 mph

For the UTM simulator, a set of algorithms are selected [13] and Table 2 sum-
marizes all the parameters. We use “free airspace structure,” meaning all eVTOL
can fly their preferred path to their destination and “free access control” which
allows an eVTOL to take-off if there is no immediate conflict. In this simulation
study, no preflight planning is used but a reactive decentralized strategy known
4
The data for these experimental results can be found in the following url: https://
github.com/mrinmoysarkar/A-small-dataset-for-eVTOL-performance-evaluation.
git
 eVTOL Performance Evaluation 9

as Modified Voltage Potential (MVP) algorithm is used for collision avoidance.

The eVTOL model used in our experiment is developed based on the geometry
of the Kitty Hawk Cora eVTOL prototype. This eVTOL configuration is also
known as a lift+cruise configuration. The original Kitty hawk Cora eVTOL and
the generated eVTOL from SUAVE tool are shown in Figure 3. Some of the
high-level parameters of the eVTOL are listed in Table 3. The complete list of
parameters of the eVTOL model can be found in the SUAVE GitHub repository
5
.

Fig. 3. The kitty Hawk Cora eVTOL (left) and SUAVE-Open VSP generated eVTOL
model (right).

5
Table 3. A set of high-level parameters of the considered eVTOL model

Parameter name Value

Max Takeoff mass 2450lbs
Max Payload mass 200lbs
Total reference area 10.76 m2
Number of lift motor 12
Number of cruise motor 1
Battery type Lithium Ion
Battery max voltage 500volt
Battery energy specific density 300W h/kg
vstall 84.28mph
Speed 111.847mph

From the UTM simulator module we generated 262 2D trajectories using

the simulation parameters from Table 2. We then used the dilation algorithm
1 to convert the 2D trajectories into full mission profiles as shown in Figure
1. During the dilation procedure, we referred to the required specification of a
UAM mission for eVTOL from Uber Elevate [7, 19], which are described in Table
5
https://github.com/suavecode/SUAVE/
blob/develop/regression/scripts/Vehicles/Stopped Rotor.py
10 Mrinmoy Sarkar et al.

4. However, we kept the altitude as Table 4, but chose other parameters such as
vertical speed and horizontal speed randomly from a bound of [µ − ∆, µ + ∆],
where µ are the values showed in Table 4. This implementation is inspired by the
different environmental conditions (both geographical and weather) at different
vertiport locations.

Table 4. Baseline mission specification used in the integrated simulation framework.

Mission Vertical Horizontal AGL Ending

segment speed(ft/min) speed(mph) Altitude (ft)
Hover Climb 0 to 500 0 50
0 to
Transition + Climb 500 300
1.2 × vstall
Departure Terminal
0 1.2 × vstall 300
area Procedures
1.2 × vstall
Accel + Climb 500 1500
to 110
Cruise 0 110 1500
110 to
Decel + Descend 500 300
1.2 × vstall
Arrival Terminal
0 to 500 1.2 × vstall 300
area Procedures
1.2 × vstall
Transition + Descend 500 to 300 50
to 0
Hover + Descend 300 to 0 0 0

From the UTM simulator with the dilation algorithm, we generated 262
full mission profiles. It took 2h 28.21min to execute the performance analysis
of the 262 mission profiles in a workstation with configuration Intel Xeon(R)
CPU at 2.2GHz with 88 cores, 128GB RAM, Nvidia Geforce RTX 2080Ti
GPU, and Ubuntu OS. In the first step, we conducted feasibility analysis of
these 262 mission profiles with the SUAVE tool using the eVTOL shown in
Figure 3. We found that only 55 mission profiles could be executed by the
eVTOL. For the remaining 207 mission profiles, the SUAVE eVTOL model
failed to execute at least one segment of the mission profile. Table 5 shows
the performance evaluation comparison between the existing UTM simulator
and the proposed simulator. From this comparison study, we can infer that the
physical constraints of eVTOL performance can directly impact the applicability
of various UTM algorithms.

For further analysis, we show two representative mission profiles, one from
the feasible set and another from the infeasible set, in Figure 4. The corre-
sponding airspeed profiles are shown in Figure 5. From Figure 4 as indicated
by the red vertical bars, the eVTOL was unable to execute the departure
terminal area procedure and cruise segments. Since the departure terminal area
procedures are generated randomly between a given upper and lower bound,
 eVTOL Performance Evaluation 11

Table 5. Performance evaluation comparison of the proposed simulation framework

with baseline UTM simulator

Simulation Number of feasible Number of infeasible

framework mission profiles mission profiles
Baseline
262 0
UTM simulator
207
(176 in departure
terminal area
Proposed simulator 55
procedure segment
& 31 in cruise
segment)

Fig. 4. A sample feasible and infeasible mission profile. The red vertical bars highlight
the segments of the infeasible mission profile where high fidelity eVTOL model was
unable to execute.

this infeasibility indicates that the considered eVTOL cannot follow any abrupt
terminal area procedures. After analyzing the cruise segments of the mission
profile using the UTM simulator, we found that the UTM simulator required
a certain speed profile to avoid collision, or maintain minimum separation in
the airspace. However, the SUAVE eVTOL cannot achieve these speed profiles.
These two cases are the indication of sample contingency that will occur in
UAM environment. The proposed simulation framework can also be extended
to capture other types of contingencies in UAM such as vertiport terminal
congestion, adverse weather or emergency landing scenarios.

We continued our analysis using the feasible set of mission profiles to measure
other performance metrics. Figure 6 shows the consumed battery energy for
mission profiles with different ranges. Figure 7 shows the voltage reading of the
battery at the end of different mission range values. From Figure 6 and 7, it
12 Mrinmoy Sarkar et al.

Fig. 5. A sample feasible and infeasible airspeed profile. The red vertical bars highlight
the segments of the infeasible mission profile where a high fidelity eVTOL model was
unable to execute.

is clear that the energy consumption of eVTOL is proportional to the mission

range while the change in voltage reading is negligible.

Fig. 6. Battery energy consumption of eVTOLs along the mission range.

In addition, we conducted a C-Rating analysis of the eVTOL’s battery and a

throttle analysis of the lift and forward motors of the eVTOL for each segment
of the mission profile. The C-rating analysis and throttle analysis is displayed
in Figures 8 and 9, respectively. From the C-rating analysis, we observe that
the eVTOL drives maximum current during the transition climb and arrival
procedure. From the throttle analysis, we discover that the lift motors primarily
contribute during the vertical motion such as the hover climb and hover descend,
while forward motor contributes in all other segments of the mission profile.
 eVTOL Performance Evaluation 13

Fig. 7. Battery voltage reading of eVTOLs along the mission range.

Fig. 8. C-Rating of the eVTOL’s battery pack for different mission segment (averaged
over the 55 feasible mission profiles).

7 Discussion
From the simulation results, the advantages of the proposed simulation frame-
work are summarized below.
– The framework provides a comprehensive and realistic platform for the eval-
uation of eVTOL’s performance in the UAM realm;
– It mitigates the limitation of the low-fidelity UTM simulator by capturing
and analyzing the infeasible mission profiles using the dilation sub-module
and a high fidelity eVTOL model in SUAVE;
14 Mrinmoy Sarkar et al.

Fig. 9. Throttle from lift & forward motors of the eVTOL for different mission segment
(averaged over the 55 feasible mission profiles).

– And the framework can be extended to perform efficient analysis on selected

representative mission profiles for a large-scale of eVTOLs in the UAM net-
work.

8 Conclusion

In this paper, we presented a new simulation framework to evaluate the per-

formance of eVTOLs utilizing state-of-the-art UTM architectures in the UAM
realm. The proposed framework integrates a UTM simulator with an open-source
eVTOL design tool to achieve a real-world representation of the UAM envi-
ronment for evaluation purposes. The developed dilation sub-module provides
detailed analysis on the unfeasible missions for the low-fidelity UTM simula-
tor, which considers the trade-off between fidelity and scale. Simulations are
performed on the developed framework to demonstrate and analyze the perfor-
mance of eVTOLs in UAM facilities in terms of different evaluation metrics.
From the simulation, the proposed framework not only reflects the details of an
eVTOL’s performance during different segments of the mission profile, but also
captures the occurrence of infeasible mission profiles. Additionally, the proposed
framework provides further insights into the specific regions of the infeasible
mission profiles to indicate different contingency situations that may occur in
future UAM environments.
In the future, the following research directions will be investigated:
 eVTOL Performance Evaluation 15

– The proposed framework employs a model-based performance evaluation

procedure for eVOTLs. We will develop a data-driven performance evalua-
tion tool for the proposed framework to reduce the time complexity.
– The current implementation of the proposed framework omits the design of
the vertiport and terminal area procedures. We will work to add the vertiport
to the proposed framework and build a more feature-rich simulation software
for eVTOL performance evaluation.

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD)
for the financial support under agreement number FA8750-15-2-0116. This work
is also partially funded through the National Institute of Aerospace’s Lan-
gley Distinguished Professor Program under grant number C16-2B00-NCAT,
and the NASA University Leadership Initiative (ULI) under grant number
80N SSC20M 0161.

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