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Today all domains of life are affected by development of digital technologies. They are seen as shaping the future of transportation as well. This paper aims to identify the development directions of urban air mobility (UAM) applications as driven by sustainability criteria as well as resulting from development of digitalisation, information and communication technologies as well as smart-city related trends.

Sustainability was assumed as key indicator standing behind perceived attractiveness of UAM. For defined sustainability – consisting of economic, environmental and social components, the base sustainability level of UAM was analysed. Then the potential for increase of sustainability was examined as resulted from UAM applications taking advantage from smart-city concept.

Development of digital technologies can support development of UAM as driving its integration within external systems especially transport systems. Deployment of information and communication technologies creates new opportunities for UAM in terms of multitask applications, shared platforms solutions leading to significant increase level of sustainability of UAM.

Results of this paper can be directly used by researchers as well as industry. They indicate both the trends related to development of UAM as integrated component of transport system as well as directly describe new, more sustainable UAM applications contributing to the successful implementation of UAM in urban conditions as well as efficient development of smart-city concepts consolidating UAM valuable functionalities.

Research results cover UAM sustainability definition, description of new, more sustainable UAM applications as well as revolutionary meaning of digital technologies especially in the context of climate neutrality and operational efficiency improvement in four-dimensional urban transport ecosystems.

Urban air mobility (UAM) development and deployment into future cities is gaining increasing and relevant interest in the past years. This study, a conceptual paper, aims to report the high-level description of the most relevant UAM application use cases (UCs) emerging from the research activities carried out in the ASSURED UAM project.

The UAM application UCs have been obtained from the ASSURED UAM project dedicated activities that have been carried out to, first, develop suitable operational concepts for UAM deployment in the next decades and, then, to further refine and design the most relevant UCs for UAM deployment in the next decades, leading to the public issue of dedicated overall document.

The ASSURED UAM UCs for UAM deployment in the next decades encompass both public (point-to-point, point-to-everywhere, direct medical transport of people) and private (direct last-mile delivery, advanced last-mile delivery, automatic personal aerial transportation) services applications, evolving in incremental way over time according to three considered time horizons (2025, 2030 and 2035), toward progressive integration into metropolitan transport system.

This paper provides final outline of the ASSURED UAM UCs, starting from the analysis of overall identified possible UAM applications, focusing on the description of the six main UCs considered as relevant for the application under the wider societal benefits point of view. The UCs are described in terms of expected operational environment, needed technological enablers and envisaged regulatory implications.