Transportmetrica B: Transport Dynamics

Future mobility dynamics: data, modeling, and operations

Background and Motivation

Future mobility is being reshaped by rapid advances in automation, connectivity, electrification, and intelligent transportation services. Two particularly important developments are automated vehicles (AVs) in road transportation and electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in low-altitude air mobility. Related concepts include urban air mobility (UAM) and advanced air mobility (AAM). These emerging systems have the potential to reshape how people and goods move, raising new questions about traffic flow, travel behavior, network capacity, infrastructure provision, and system operations.

Despite differences in physical environment and technological maturity, automated road mobility and low-altitude air mobility share fundamental questions in transport dynamics. Heterogeneous interactions, time-varying demand, capacity constraints, congestion and conflict propagation, behavioral adaptation, operational uncertainty, and real-time control arise in both domains. Their continued development may also create new interactions through passenger access and egress, freight transfer, shared facilities, coordinated scheduling, and integrated air-ground transportation services. Closer exchange between these research communities could help identify transferable transport-dynamics theories and methods while clarifying the constraints specific to each domain. This special issue seeks to bridge these research communities by advancing transferable models, data-driven insights, and operational methodologies while encouraging both domain-specific advances and research on emerging air-ground interactions. At the same time, increasingly available multimodal data and advances in traffic modeling, machine learning, reinforcement learning, and digital twins are creating new opportunities to understand, predict, and manage future mobility systems.

Consistent with Transportmetrica B's focus on the dynamic aspects of transport systems and behavior, this special issue addresses automated road mobility and low-altitude air mobility, including their emerging interactions. Contributions may address either domain independently; integrated air-ground analysis is encouraged but not required. Studies involving other transport modes or technologies should be directly connected to automated road or low-altitude mobility and should make a clear contribution to transport dynamics, behavior, operations, or control.

Topics of Interest

Data and Empirical Analysis

· Multi-source sensing, trajectory reconstruction, state estimation, calibration, and validation for automated road traffic and low-altitude air mobility

· Demand forecasting, mode choice, adoption, and behavioral adaptation associated with AV, eVTOL, and UAV services

Modeling of Transport Dynamics

· Macroscopic, mesoscopic, and microscopic traffic flow models for connected, automated, and mixed-autonomy road transportation, including stability, capacity, phase transitions, and congestion propagation

· Three-dimensional traffic flow models for UAV and eVTOL networks, including flow-density relationships, capacity, stability, conflict propagation, and airspace dynamics

· Dynamic traffic assignment, network equilibrium, and multi-layer network modeling for automated road, low-altitude, and emerging air-ground systems

Operations and Control

· Cooperative driving, fleet management, route guidance, traffic control, and network-level operations for connected and automated vehicles (CAVs)

· Trajectory management, scheduling, unmanned aircraft system traffic management (UTM), airspace allocation, vertiport operations, charging, and service control for UAV and eVTOL systems

· Machine learning, reinforcement learning, and digital twins for prediction and adaptive control, supported by rigorous transportation modeling and validation

Safety, Integration, Reliability, and Resilience

· Safety assessment, conflict and collision risk modeling, fault propagation, and risk-aware operations for automated road and low-altitude air mobility systems

· Passenger access and egress, transfer interfaces, coordinated services, logistics, reliability, and resilience across road and low-altitude transportation networks