Machine Learning Aided Air Traffic Flow Analysis Based on Aviation Big Data

Timely and efficient air traffic flow management (ATFM) is a key issue in future dense air traffic. The emerging demands for unmanned aerial vehicles and general aviation aircraft aggravate the burden of the ATFM. Thanks to the advanced automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) technique, the aerial vehicles can be tracked and monitored in a real-time and accurate manner, providing possibility for establishing a more intelligent ATFM architecture. In this article, we first form an aviation Big Data platform by using the distributed ADS-B ground stations and the obtained ADS-B messages. By exploring the constructed dataset and mapping the extracted information to the routes, the air traffic flow between different cities can be counted and predicted, where the prediction task is implemented on the basis of two machine learning methods, respectively. The experimental results based on real-world data demonstrate that the proposed traffic flow prediction model adopting long short-term memory (LSTM) can achieve better performance, especially when abnormal factors in traffic control are considered.