The Reliability Analysis of Air Traffic Network Based on Trajectory Clustering of Terminal Area

The development of civil aviation has led to flight operations generating massive datasets. Derived from Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast technology, an eigengap-based automatic hierarchical clustering algorithm is proposed, aiming to overcome the human intervention requirement of hierarchical clustering to determine the number of track clusters in the terminal area. First, the trajectory pair similarity matrix is calculated based on the Euclidean distance and an adaptive scale parameter. Second, the Laplace transformation is applied on the similarity matrix and the eigenvalues are obtained in order to determine the number of clusters. Finally, the hierarchical clustering algorithm divides the terminal area trajectory into several sub-categories. Taking a terminal approach trajectory as an example, simulation analysis is performed, with results revealing that the algorithm divides 404 north-south-oriented aircraft flight trajectories into 2 and 3 categories. Furthermore, the new-index is used to evaluate the clustering results, demonstrating its effectiveness is better than the automatic k-means algorithm. Our study provides support for reliability analysis of air traffic network in the terminal area.