Aircraft trajectory recognition via statistical analysis clustering for Suvarnabhumi International Airport

Since Suvarnabhumi International Airport is considered to be the biggest airport in Thailand, a big travelling-hub of southeast Asia and plays a significant part to the economy of Thailand relying on the tourism industry, an aircraft trajectory recognition is essential to support the high traffic management system from around the world. The first and essential stage of airport capacity enhancement is descriptive-analytic in several sections of the airport, including flight trajectory behaviors in order to plan an improvement procedure in the future. This experiment deploys K-mean and Gaussian Mixture clustering to compare results by using available automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) dataset provided by the bigdata system from various websites. The test varies the number of clustering from three to ten and measures how similar an object is to its cluster by using the Silhouette score. Gaussian Mixture clustering produces at least three unique flight trajectories when setting the number of clustering equal to four, giving the Silhouette score of 0.43. K-mean clustering with the number of clustering equal to ten gives the highest Silhouette score of 0.45. However, its routes are not clearly recognized when compared with the Gaussian Mixture clustering. Although the overall results are not clearly shown in the pattern, it is enough to describe the trajectory patterns of the aircrafts taking off or landing over Suvarnabhumi International Airport.