4-D Flight Trajectory Prediction with Constrained LSTM Network

The increasing aviation activities pose a challenge to ensure a safe and orderly flight. Trajectory prediction is one of the most important forecasting tasks in Air Traffic Management. Accurate prediction is reasonable for safe and orderly flight tasks in civil aviation monitoring. Points of interests play an important role in most land traffic prediction algorithms due to their abilities in positioning and marking. Compared with land traffic, the sparse way-points and shared airways make it difficult for flight trajectory prediction. A constrained Long Short-Term Memory network for flight trajectory prediction is proposed in this paper. According to the dynamic characteristics of the aircraft, we propose three kinds of constraints to climbing, cruising, and descending/approaching phases, in particular, they are Top of climb, Way-points, and Runway direction, correspondingly. Our model is able to keep long-term dependencies with dynamic physical constraints. Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise and Linear Least Squares are used in data segmentation and preprocessing. Sliding windows help maintain the continuity of trajectory. Four-dimensional spatial-temporal trajectory set consisting of spatial position and timestamps is used to prove the efficiency of our approach. Multiple ADS-B ground stations contribute to our experimental dataset. The widely used Long Short-Term Memory network, Markov Model, weighted Markov Model, Support Vector Machine, and Kalman Filter are used for comparison. Quantitative analysis demonstrates that our model outperforms the above-mentioned state-of-the-art models, and lays a good foundation for decision-making in different scenarios.