A multiple-airport system (MAS) consists of more than two airports in a metropolitan area under a large block of terminal airspace that is managed by one or two air traffic control units. When the capacity of an airport or of the terminal airspace drops, flight delays occur in the MAS system. A quick estimation and predication of traffic congestion in the MAS is important yet challenging. This paper aims to develop a queuing network model of MAS using point-wise stationary queues. The model analyzes the changes of non-stationary queues under the principle of flow conservation to capture flight delay propagation in the system. Regression analyses are performed to examine the relationship between the arrival and departure efficiencies of different airports. The model is validated with the data of Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area airports. Simulation results show that the model can effectively estimate flight delays in the MAS.

Safety is a top priority for civil aviation. Data mining in digital Flight Data Recorder (FDR) or Quick Access Recorder (QAR) data, commonly referred to as black box data on aircraft, has gained interest for proactive safety management. New anomaly detection methods, primarily clustering methods, have been developed to monitor pilot operations and detect any risks from such flight data. However, all existing anomaly detection methods are offline learning — the models are trained once using historical data and used for all future predictions. In practice, new flight data are accumulated continuously and analyzed every month at airlines. Clustering such dynamically growing data is challenging for an offline method because it is memory and time intensive to re-train the model every time new data come in. If the model is not re-trained, false alarms or missed detections may increase since the model cannot reflect changes in data patterns. To address this problem, we propose a novel incremental anomaly detection method based on Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to identify common patterns and detect outliers in flight operations from digital flight data. It is a probabilistic clustering model of flight operations that can incrementally update its clusters based on new data rather than to re-cluster all data from scratch. It trains an initial GMM model based on historical offline data. Then, it continuously adapts to new incoming data points via an expectation–maximization (EM) algorithm. To track changes in flight operation patterns, only model parameters need to be saved, not the raw flight data. The proposed method was tested on three sets of simulation data and two sets of real-world flight data. Compared with the traditional offline GMM method, the proposed method can generate similar clustering results with significantly reduced processing time (57 %–99 % time reduction in testing sets) and memory usage (91 %–95 % memory usage reduction in testing sets). Preliminary results indicate that the incremental learning scheme is effective in dealing with dynamically growing data in flight data analytics.

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.

Resilience is the ability of a system to withstand and stay operational in the face of an unexpected disturbance or unpredicted changes. Recent studies on air transport system resilience focus on topology characteristics after the disturbance and measure the robustness of the network with respect to connectivity. The dynamic processes occurring at the node and link levels are often ignored. Here we analyze airport network resilience by considering both structural and dynamical aspects. We develop a simulation model to study the operational performance of the air transport system when airports operate at degraded capacity rather than completely shutting down. Our analyses show that the system deteriorates soon after disruptive events occur but returns to an acceptable level after a period of time. Static resilience of the airport network is captured by a phase transition in which a small change to airport capacity will result in a sharp change in system punctuality. After the phase transition point, decreasing airport capacity has little impact on system performance. Critical airports which have significant influence on the performance of whole system are identified, and we find that some of these cannot be detected based on the analysis of network structural indicators alone. Our work shows that air transport system's resilience can be well understood by combining network science and operational dynamics.