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Urban air mobility (UAM) is a mode of transportation that avoids traffic congestion by flying people and cargo above it at low altitudes. It may sound like science fiction or something from the cartoon "The Jetsons," which depicted people going from place to place in flying cars. However, that concept is set to become a reality as electric flying taxis could begin operating in the U.S. as soon as 2025.

The eVTOLs (electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft) ascend and land vertically just like a helicopter and because they're electric, are much quieter.

"It ties into this concept of smart cities where getting around—going from one place to the other—is going to be much easier and sustainable, while allowing for dense urban areas," says Raghu Raghavan, Dean's Professor of Management Science and Operations Management at the University of Maryland Robert H. Smith School of Business.

The aircraft will take off and land—picking up and dropping off passengers as they go—from sites called vertiports. The vertiports can be located on the roofs of existing buildings. The flying taxis seat four to six people and on a typical day, a group of passengers might take a flying taxi to the airport after being picked up from a vertiport close to their homes.

Raghavan and Bruce Golden, the France-Merrick Chair in Management Science at Smith, worked with then-Ph.D. candidate Eric Oden to perform analyses that looked at the logistics associated with running a system of these taxis in the early going. The research focuses on the problem of routing and scheduling them in a way that maximizes the number of passengers transported.

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