A Collaborative GIS for Planning of Urban Drone Launch and Landing Site Locations

The recent emergence of urban air mobility (UAM) is transforming urban landscape, with studies predicting its increasing role in the coming decades. This emergence of UAM calls for developing decision-support tools for planning of launch and landing sites (LLS) in constrained and complex urban environments. Such decision-support tools must be useful and usable in the context where planning processes related to this emerging technology are also emerging themselves. In practice, this means carefully designing the functionality of the tool itself according to the current and future user needs, as well as clarifying the roles and responsibilities of different actors in the planning process. This research presents the development of a geospatial decision-support tool for identifying the potential urban UAM LLS for drones with a diameter of up to 3 meters. In addition, this study presents the preliminary evaluation of this decision-support tool with a set of potential users, including urban planners from the cities of Helsinki (Finland), Stockholm (Sweden) and Hamburg (Germany).