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Abstract Urban air mobility (UAM) is an emerging air transportation mode to alleviate the ground traffic burden and achieve zero direct aviation emissions. Due to the potential economic scaling effects, the UAM traffic flow is expected to increase dramatically once implemented, and its market can be substantially large. To be prepared for the era of UAM, we study the fair and risk‐averse urban air mobility resource allocation model (FairUAM) under passenger demand and airspace capacity uncertainties for fair, safe, and efficient aircraft operations. FairUAM is a two‐stage model, where the first stage is the aircraft resource allocation, and the second stage is to fairly and efficiently assign the ground and airspace delays to each aircraft provided the realization of random airspace capacities and passenger demand. We show that FairUAM is NP‐hard even when there is no delay assignment decision or no aircraft allocation decision. Thus, we recast FairUAM as a mixed‐integer linear program (MILP) and explore model properties and strengthen the model formulation by developing multiple families of valid inequalities. The stronger formulation allows us to develop a customized exact decomposition algorithm with both benders and L‐shaped cuts, which significantly outperforms the off‐the‐shelf solvers. Finally, we numerically demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and draw managerial insights when applying FairUAM to a real‐world network. 

This paper studies the distributionally robust fair transit resource allocation model (DrFRAM) under the Wasserstein ambiguity set to optimize the public transit resource allocation during a pandemic. We show that the proposed DrFRAM is highly nonconvex and nonlinear, and it is NP-hard in general. Fortunately, we show that DrFRAM can be reformulated as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) by leveraging the equivalent representation of distributionally robust optimization and monotonicity properties, binarizing integer variables, and linearizing nonconvex terms. To improve the proposed MILP formulation, we derive stronger ones and develop valid inequalities by exploiting the model structures. Additionally, we develop scenario decomposition methods using different MILP formulations to solve the scenario subproblems and introduce a simple yet effective no one left-based approximation algorithm with a provable approximation guarantee to solve the model to near optimality. Finally, we numerically demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches and apply them to real-world data provided by the Blacksburg Transit. History: This paper has been accepted for the Transportation Science Special Issue on Emerging Topics in Transportation Science and Logistics. Funding: This work was supported by the Division of Computing and Communication Foundations [Grant 2153607] and the Division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation [Grant 2046426]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/trsc.2022.1159 .