A Traffic Engineering Model for Air Taxi Services

In this paper, we propose a general model for on-demand air taxi services for a single service provider which unifies the previous research in this area. We then apply this model to the analysis of the week-to-week resource utilization of an air taxi service network. Towards that end, we develop two representations of the general air taxi service model to study several weekly utilization metrics at differing levels of abstraction. The first representation, a discrete-event model, records weekly levels of activity while specifying the minute-by-minute operations of a hypothetical air taxi service provider. The second representation, referred to as the flow model, is an aggregate model which describes the expected levels of activity for an air taxi service provider without specifying event-level operation. To "validate" the flow model against the more specific discrete-event model, we conduct a simple statistical comparison on the outputs of the two representations. Finally, we illustrate how the flow model can be applied towards the optimal pricing of passenger fares for a single air taxi service provider.