Urban Air Mobility Integration: Airspace Management, Noise Footprints, and Ground Infrastructure
Keywords:
Urban air mobility, eVTOL, airspace management, noise mitigation, vertiport infrastructure, digital twin, sustainable aviation, smart citiesAbstract
This review aims to synthesize current interdisciplinary research on the integration of Urban Air Mobility (UAM) systems, focusing on how airspace management, noise footprints, and ground infrastructure interact to shape safe, efficient, and socially acceptable urban aerial transportation networks. This qualitative systematic review analyzed 18 peer-reviewed articles published between 2018 and 2025, selected from Scopus, IEEE Xplore, ScienceDirect, and Web of Science. Inclusion criteria required explicit coverage of at least one of the three focal UAM domains: airspace management, noise modeling, or ground infrastructure planning. Using NVivo 14, all sources were thematically coded through an inductive three-stage process—open, axial, and selective coding—until theoretical saturation was achieved. The analysis extracted recurring conceptual relationships and operational frameworks that underpin the practical and regulatory challenges of UAM integration. Three main themes and 18 subthemes were identified. The first theme, Airspace Management and Operational Integration, revealed priorities such as dynamic traffic management, regulatory harmonization, and CNS technological enablers for safety and data security. The second theme, Noise Footprints and Environmental Compatibility, emphasized advances in acoustic modeling, psychoacoustic perception studies, and community-centered noise mitigation policies. The third theme, Ground Infrastructure and Urban Integration, covered vertiport design, multimodal connectivity, energy systems, digital twins, and sustainable business models. The synthesis demonstrated strong interdependencies among these domains—particularly the coupling of noise constraints with airspace capacity and vertiport siting decisions—highlighting the necessity for cross-domain co-design frameworks. Urban air mobility integration demands an interdisciplinary, system-of-systems approach that harmonizes regulatory frameworks, technological innovation, environmental stewardship, and social acceptance. The findings call for coordinated policy, adaptive airspace governance, and community engagement to ensure sustainable deployment of UAM ecosystems in future smart cities.
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