A Community-Based Approach for Hub Placements

Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) is a rapidly emerging sector in the aerospace industry that seeks to revolutionize transportation by integrating highly automated aircraft into the airspace. As AAM technology matures, establishing a network framework and strategic hub locations becomes crucial for transitioning from theoretical models to practical applications in transportation systems. This thesis investigates community-based strategies for hub placement within the AAM infrastructure. More specifically, it utilizes network segmentation to decompose a network into communities to simplify the hub selection process into more manageable sub-problems. Our first contribution is the development of a specialized community detection methodology called Directed Flow Communities (DFC), which is designed to accommodate the attributes of transportation networks. Next, we conduct a case study using the Freight Analysis Framework (FAF) dataset as a proxy for AAM demand. The empirical investigation focuses on three key sectors: pharmaceuticals, electronics, and comprehensive freight flows, each presenting distinct challenges and insights into the network’s structure. The findings show the effectiveness of the community detection-based methods in unveiling cost-efficient hub locations.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Chavalithumrong, Alissa

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Balakrishnan, Hamsa

Statement dc:rights

• Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
• Copyright retained by author(s)

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/155480

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/155480