Supply-demand matching for vertiport location and capacity allocation optimization in urban low-altitude logistics: A case study of Nanjing

Duxin Wang; Zhao Xu

doi:10.70401/jbde.2026.0042

Supply-demand matching for vertiport location and capacity allocation optimization in urban low-altitude logistics: A case study of Nanjing

Duxin Wang

Zhao Xu

*Correspondence to: Zhao Xu, School of Civil Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing 211189, Jiangsu, China. E-mail: xuzhao@seu.edu.cn

J Build Des Environ. 2026;4:202622. 10.70401/jbde.2026.0042

Received: May 13, 2026Accepted: August 06, 2026Published: August 06, 2026

This manuscript is made available in its unedited form to allow early access to the reported findings. Further editing will be completed before final publication. As such, the content may include errors, and standard legal disclaimers are applicable.

Abstract

The rapid development of the low-altitude economy has positioned vertiports as critical heavy-asset hubs in urban logistics networks, where siting decisions affect both delivery access and facility utilization. Existing maximum-coverage models do not explicitly represent station throughput or allocated order volumes. This study therefore retains the original three-stage framework - demand assessment, HFPIPS candidate generation, and capacitated location-allocation - while correcting the demand surface to use area-weighted land-use shares and clarifying that the utilization floor is an application-specific minimum-throughput rule rather than a new algebraic form. In Nanjing, 8,811 demand grids and 10,283 planning candidates produce 2,678,898 radius-feasible pairs, reduced to 374,873 pairs by demand-adaptive pruning. Under a 300 s single-thread budget, the high-coverage CFLP returns a verified feasible incumbent of 195 stations delivering 156,300 orders/day (78.13%), with 66.79% average utilization, 22.50% minimum utilization, and 0.953 km average delivery distance. At the same 195-site budget, a deterministic MCLP-greedy baseline achieves 97.05% nominal geometric coverage but only 63.87% capacity-feasible delivery. Removing the utilization floor delivers only 29 additional orders while opening four extra sites and permitting utilization as low as 1.58%. Land-use coefficient contrast tests change delivery by less than 0.27 percentage points and preserve the selected station set. The results support capacity-aware planning, while building-level engineering data, heterogeneous fleets, temporal demand, and unresolved solver gaps remain limitations.

Keywords

Vertiport location, capacitated facility location problem, urban low-altitude logistics

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Wang D, Xu Z. Supply-demand matching for vertiport location and capacity allocation optimization in urban low-altitude logistics: A case study of Nanjing. J Build Des Environ. 2026;4:202622. https://doi.org/10.70401/jbde.2026.0042