The terminal airspace that surrounds an airport is the area with high flight density and complex structure. Aircraft are asked to follow the standard arrival and departure routes in terminal airspace, yet the actual trajectories may deviate due to air traffic control (ATC) instructions, pilots' decisions, surveillance and flying performance variations, etc. Predicting aircraft trajectories considering such uncertainties plays a crucial role in evaluating a redesign of the standard routes. Traditional simulation approaches for generating aircraft trajectories in a terminal airspace are cumbersome to use as it requires a detailed setup for each new scenario, while most existing data-driven methods can only be used in an airspace with historical trajectories, not applicable to new structure designs or other terminal areas. To fill in gap, in this paper, we develop a new model based on Multilayer Perceptron Neural Network (MLPNN) to predict aircraft trajectories with uncertainties for terminal airspace design evaluations. A key feature of the proposed model is that it is trained on existing standard routes yet it can be applied to new standard routes to generate trajectories. The enabler of the model's transferability is a novel input-and-output construction method for feature representations of raw trajectory data based on domain knowledge, including trajectory reconstruction, feature engineering, and output designing. After the input-and-output construction, a supervised learning model based on MLPNN is built to predict the standard deviations from the extracted features using historical trajectory data of existing standard routes. Once the model is built, trajectories with uncertainty can be simulated, through applying Gaussian distribution and exponential moving average algorithms, even on newly designed standard routes, where no aircraft have flown yet. Subsequently, new terminal airspace designs could be evaluated for their safety, efficiency, and environmental implications based on the simulated trajectories. The proposed model was tested on real-world operational data. Results showed that the model can quantify the characteristics of aircraft trajectories that are transferable across standard routes, and generate trajectories for new standard routes. We also demonstrated the proposed model on evaluating deficiencies on fuel consumption of actual arrival trajectories compared with the designed arrival routes. The generated trajectories showed 23%–37% more fuel consumption on average than the standard arrival routes in the terminal airspace of Hong Kong International Airport, which was validated with actual flight data.

With the dynamic air traffic demand and the constrained capacity resources, accurately predicting airport throughput is essential to ensure the efficiency and resilience of air traffic operations. Many research efforts have been made to predict traffic throughputs or flight delays at an airport or over a network. However, it is still a challenging problem due to the complex spatiotemporal dynamics of the highly interacted air transportation systems. To address this challenge, we propose a novel deep learning model, graph attention neural network stacking with a Long short-term memory unit (GAT-LSTM), to predict the short-term airport throughput over a national air traffic network. LSTM layers are included to extract the temporal correlations in the data, while the graph attention mechanism is used to capture the spatial dependencies. For the graph attention mechanism, two graph modeling methods, airport-based graph and OD-pair graph are explored in this study. We tested the proposed model using real-world air traffic data involving 65 major airports in China over 3 months in 2017 and compared its performance with other state-of-the-art models. Results showed that the temporal pattern was the dominate factor, compared to the spatial pattern, in predicting airport throughputs over an air traffic network. Among the prediction models that we compared, both the proposed model and LSTM performed well on prediction accuracy over the entire network. Better performance of the proposed model was observed when focusing on airports with larger throughputs. We also conducted an analysis on model interpretability. We found that spatiotemporal correlations in the data were learned and shown via the model parameters, which helped us to gain insights into the topology and the dynamics of the air traffic network.

En-route congestion causes delays in air traffic networks and will become more prominent as air traffic demand will continue to increase yet airspace volume cannot grow. However, most existing studies on flight delay modeling do not consider en-route congestion explicitly. In this study, we propose a new flight delay model, Multi-layer Air Traffic Network Delay (MATND) model, to capture the impact of en-route congestion on flight delays over an air traffic network. This model is developed by a data-driven approach, taking aircraft tracking data and flight schedules as inputs to characterize a national air traffic network, as well as a system-level model approach, modeling the delay process based on queueing theory. The two approaches combined make the network delay model a close representation of reality and easy-to-implement for what-if scenario analysis. The proposed MATND model includes 1) a data-driven method to learn a network composed of airports, en-route congestion points, and air corridors from aircraft tracking data, 2) a stochastic and dynamic queuing network model to calculate flight delays and track their propagation at both airports and in en-route congestion areas, in which the delays are computed via a space–time decomposition method. Using one month of historical aircraft tracking data over China's air traffic network, MATND is tested and shows to give an accurate quantification of delays of the national air traffic network. “What-if” scenario analyses are conducted to demonstrate how the proposed model can be used for the evaluation of air traffic network improvement strategies, where the manipulation of reality at such a scale is impossible. Results show that MATND is computationally efficient, well suited for evaluating the impact of policy alternatives on system-wide delay at a macroscopic level.