U-space will enable urban air mobility (UAM) on a wide scale, facilitating a variety of use cases (e.g. medical and emergency transport, delivery of goods, passenger transport services). Social acceptance and impact on citizens is not completely understood in this growing scenario. Current U-space performance frameworks include indicators to evaluate UAM’s environmental impact. However, they are still too generic and aggregated to properly capture the broad variety of impacts of UAM operations.
The goal of MUSE is to develop a set of performance indicators (PIs), methods and tools for the assessment of the impact of UAM operations on the liveability and quality of life in European cities. The project established the basis for a future U-space service that supports the minimisation of UAM’s negative social and environmental externalities.
This general goal can be translated into the following specific objectives:
1. To define a set of U-space social and environmental PIs able to capture the full range of UAM impacts on citizens’ quality of life.
2. To develop new methods and tools for the measurement and forecasting of the proposed KPIs.
3. To showcase and evaluate the capabilities of the new methods and tools developed by MUSE through their application to a set of case studies in one or more European cities.
4. To create the conditions for the transfer of the project results to the subsequent stages of the R&I cycle by outlining a new SESAR Solution, the MUSE U-space Environmental and Social Impact Assessment Framework, that serves as the basis for a future U-space service aimed at optimising the social and environmental performance of UAM operations.
MUSE produced four main results: (i) the MUSE U-space Environmental and Social Performance Framework, (iii) MUSE U-space Environmental and Social Impact Assessment Toolset; (iv) the Case Study Report; and (iv) the MUSE Solution Data Pack, which consolidates the Performance Framework and the Assessment Toolset into a SESAR Solution.
The nature itself of the solution provides measurements of the scale of UAM’s impact on citizens. Numerous indicators developed provide the number of people exposed to, for example, a certain noise level, or the cumulative exposure on a specific population group segmented by age, gender, or other socioeconomic factors. Since UAM operations are inherently local, the primary impact is felt in urban environments. With over 260 European cities projected to exceed 300,000 inhabitants, MUSE provides a vital framework for local governments to manage the integration of drone services into daily city life.
