“We’re talking about integrating aviation with everything else. We’re trying to break the silo between aviation and the others.” – Husni Idris, Research Aerospace Engineer at NASA Ames, chair of the Aviation in Multimodal Transportation Aerospace Integrated Engagement Committee (AiMT AIEC).
The growth of the Aviation in Multimodal Transportation Aerospace Integrated Engagement Committee has been exciting to watch. As the first Aeronautics Domain topic to evolve in scope and experiment with multiple engagement formats, their nonlinear approach has garnered participation from planners, platform developers, and researchers who look at aviation’s role in broader passenger pathways.
In 2024, the group organized a Forum 360 regarding use cases for aviation in the multimodal transportation system. In 2025, they held a partner webinar with the Intelligent Transportation Society of America (ITS America) exploring state and regional cases for advanced air mobility and the system needed for aviation to integrate with other transportation modes.
• Related Reading: Beyond Gate to Gate: Integrating Advanced Air Mobility into America’s Multimodal Transportation Network
They then held a workshop at AIAA AVIATION Forum 2025 looking at use cases where advanced air mobility could provide value in transporting passengers as well as goods. One of the key takeaways from the 2025 workshop was the need to bring cross-industry stakeholders into the same room for AIAA AVIATION Forum 2026.
• Related Reading: Exploring AAM Multimodal Integration at 2025 AIAA AVIATION Forum
The theme for this year’s workshop was how to situate aviation, and prospective use cases for advanced aviation, in both multimodal planning discussions and academic conversations. Moderator Darshan Sarojini, Assistant Professor at Virginia Tech, explored the current state-of-the-art methods and tools for evaluating multimodal transportation with transportation professionals and researchers including:
- Joe Castiglione of the Zephyr Foundation, who presented from a Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) perspective on activity-based models for transportation analysis
- Yu (April) Zhang of the University of South Florida, who presented on flight planning and various AAM developments in Florida
- Prajwal Shivaprakasha of the DLR, who shared the COLOSSUS framework, that enables an agent-based system of systems modeling
- Jean-Luc Lupien, who described new approaches to passenger flow modeling and mobility barriers for last-mile transportation—mainly inconvenience and cost
“We also wanted the workshop to guide us toward common stakeholder metrics and bridging gaps in modeling capabilities and tools: Stakeholder (x) uses metric (y) to make decision (z). Different stakeholders use different tools. What are the tools? What are their limitations? What is needed vs. what is available? Where are the gaps?” – Vishwanath Bulusu, Senior Aerospace Research Scientist at Crown Innovations, Inc. and Vice Chair of the AiMT AIEC.
The group’s next major deliverable will be the publication of their multi-journal special issue, coordinated by Max Li, Assistant Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan and led by AIAA’s Journal of Air Transportation (Craig Wanke, Editor-in-Chief). The group aligned three academic journals – Journal of Air Transportation, Informs Transportation Science, and IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems – with a call to study challenges and opportunities related to multimodal transportation across modes, technology, and connectivity. AIAA will hold webinars in conjunction with the publications in autumn 2026.
The group plans to distill the findings of these activities by developing a systematic review paper of tools available for multimodal planning and decision-making. As part of developing this product, they also plan to create a scoping exercise to determine a rubric for stakeholder inclusion and exclusion and develop more opportunities for community outreach.
