# Benefits of Advanced Air Mobility for Society and Environment: A Case Study of Ohio
## 1 Introduction
The operational demands and projected advantages of AAM are pushing partnerships between public and commercial stakeholders, headed by the FAA and NASA, to develop AAM infrastructure to ensure the safe, secure, efficient, and equitable integration of UAS operations in the NAS [5]. Additionally, a broad range of technical and regulatory challenges is currently being addressed by the government, academia, and industry as part of  
Figure 1: Notional AAM architecture. the AAM Mission to enable roll out of AAM in the near future [6]. The existing literature has mostly focused on concepts and technologies required for AAM operations; however, to successfully implement any revolutionary new technologically advanced transportation system, it is necessary at first to check if the implementation would be cost-effective. _Cost-benefit analysis (CBA)_ is an approach that validates the decision-making process for the government and private service providers and offers them a sound financial basis for their investments in such a system. CBA assists with determining if the payback or return on investment outweighs the costs and whether the project is financially robust and secure enough. It also streamlines the complicated investment decisions that must be made throughout the implementation. Before the government takes a step to invest in this new AAM infrastructure, the monetary and, especially, the non-monetary valuation of the AAM infrastructure should be taken under consideration to identify whether the investment has the potential to bring significant benefits and outcomes to the people of its state. To address this gap, we conducted a rigorous cost-benefit analysis of the AAM infrastructure using real world historical data, with a focus on identifying and evaluating the non-monetary benefits of AAM for the society and environment, from the perspective of the government for the 2022-2032 time period. The state of Ohio was chosen as the place for implementation of AAM infrastructure in this study. More specifically, we focus on the six major cities of Ohio--Akron, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Toledo, and Dayton--as they have the highest market potential for AAM in Ohio. In this context, the following objectives were sought to be achieved by the authors of this paper:  
1. To identify and measure the most critical and substantial cost and benefit factors for society and environment associated with the AAM infrastructure implementation in Ohio in its six major cities. 2. To determine if investment in AAM infrastructure is justified by evaluating its net positive gain. The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: Section 2 examines and explores the relevant literature. In Section 3, we discussed the approach and model used for forecasting various variables of interest for the next 11 years. The feasible benefit and cost factors related to AAM infrastructure have been identified and evaluated in Sections 4 and 5, respectively. After that, Section 6 presents and discusses the results. Lastly, Section 7 concludes the paper with the insights gained from the analysis and potential future work.