ORCID Number
0000-0002-4142-3195
Date of Award
Summer 2026
Access Type
Dissertation - Open Access
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
Department
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Committee Chair
Richard S. Stansbury
Committee Chair Email
stansbur@erau.edu
First Committee Member
M. Ilhan Akbas
First Committee Member Email
akbasm@erau.edu
Second Committee Member
Tianyu Yang
Second Committee Member Email
yang482@erau.edu
Third Committee Member
Keith Garfield
Third Committee Member Email
keith.garfield@erau.edu
Fourth Committee Member
Yongxin Liu
Fourth Committee Member Email
yongxin.liu@erau.edu
College Dean
James W. Gregory
Abstract
Community noise is a primary barrier to the public acceptance and deployment of Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) and Urban Air Mobility (UAM) air taxi operations. This dissertation develops a coupled siting, routing, and noise optimization framework that links vertiport placement to its downstream acoustic consequences, demonstrated through a Daytona Beach case study. Candidate vertiports are screened and selected using accessibility, safety, demand, and feasibility criteria, and the selected sites form a directed network of 20 routes. Each trajectory is evaluated with a physics-based acoustic pipeline reporting Lmax, SEL, and EPNL at school, hospital, and residential receptors, showing that received exposure is route and receptor-specific rather than a simple function of distance.
Two route refinement strategies are evaluated. Horizontal optimization shifts conflict-prone corridors away from sensitive areas while preserving the origin-destination (OD) structure, lowering predicted noise around schools while redistributing rather than uniformly reducing the acoustic footprint across the residential and hospital areas. Altitude optimization raises interior flight profiles to increase source-receiver separation, reducing receptor exposure at the cost of a growing mission energy penalty. A multi-objective stage then selects among baseline, horizontal, altitude, and integrated candidates under Efficiency, Balanced, Noise, and Sensitive-Receptor Priorities; the noise-oriented cases reduce class-balanced Lmax,95 by up to about 3.9 dB and SEL95 and EPNL95 by about 6 dB at modest route length cost. A time of day (TOD) analysis shows that single event exposure is governed mainly by route geometry, whereas cumulative daily exposure (DNL) is driven by the operating schedule and night hour weighting, with the largest reductions at hospital receptors. The results support integrating vertiport selection, route geometry, trajectory refinement, receptor-aware optimization, and TOD operation within a single noise-aware planning framework rather than treating them in isolation.
Scholarly Commons Citation
Raza, Waleed, "Noise-Optimized Routes for Air Taxi" (2026). Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses. 1007.
https://commons.erau.edu/edt/1007
Included in
Computer Engineering Commons, Navigation, Guidance, Control and Dynamics Commons, Systems Engineering and Multidisciplinary Design Optimization Commons
