Mengying Fu

Mengying Fu is one of the master students studying Transportation System at the Technical University Munich, Germany. Before that, she obtained her Bachelor’s Degree from JAMK University of Applied Sciences, Finland.

Currently she is working on her master thesis in the field of "transport mode choice". The thesis will be supervised under Univ.-Prof. Dr. Constantinos Antoniou, and in cooperation with Bauhaus Luftfahrt e.V., a Munich-based aviation research institution. This research project is motivated by a novel concept called Urban Air Mobility (UAM), which can be realized by developing Personal Air or Aerial Vehicle (PAV) that are specially designed to be capable of performing passenger transport missions in an urban environment.

The thesis project is expected to identify the influencing factors (especially some attitudinal factors) affecting acceptance of UAM as a new transport mode. The outcome regards different user segmentation, and considers user’s attitudes and perceptions in their decision-making process. And the market share and elasticities of demand can be further predicted correspondingly.

Due to the involvement of the new transport mode which is not yet available in the system, a stated-preference survey (Choice Based Conjoint Analysis) has to be designed, as it can be used to measure preferences for transport mode features, and to learn how changes to certain attributes affect demand. The survey is planned to be conducted initially in Munich but with the possibility of further research based on data collected worldwide.