Integrating ARIMA and Bidirectional LSTM to Predict ETA in Multi-Airport Systems

Traffic states prediction in air transportation systems is a challenging problem and has not been fully explored because it is subject to many more highly correlated factors and a more complicated traffic management scheme compared to urban transportation systems. It becomes a more formidable task when facing a multi-airport system (MAS), in which several major airports are closely located and tightly coupled with each other through limited terminal airspace. In this work, we propose a novel method using a time series model and recurrent neural network to make the estimated time of arrival (ETA) for a flight to an MAS, which can be potentially utilized for flight delay prediction and congestion analysis. The experiment utilizes two months of 4D trajectories data from Beijing Capital International Airport (PEK) to Shenzhen Bao’an International airport (ZGSZ). The entire prediction work is decomposed into two sub-problems, en-route travel time prediction which is from flight origin to the entering gate of MAS, defined as the location is 300km from the airport in MAS, and terminal maneuvering area (TMA) travel time prediction which is from the entrance to flight’s destination. The auto-regressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), a time series prediction model, is used to predict travel time in en-route under given the flight departure time. Bidirectional long short term memory (LSTM), a recurrent neural network, is developed to forecast travel time in the arrival approach by utilizing spatio-temporal features. To design the input features, we use density-based spatial clustering (DBSCAN) with the help of the Voronoi diagram to extract spatial information from every historical flight trajectory of aircraft operated in an MAS, then select the observation time window to capture the temporal information for each flight. The Multivariate Stacked Fully connected-Bidirectional LSTM (MSFCB-LSTM) model is constructed to make shortterm forecasting using spatio-temporal features we designed when the flight’s entering MAS time is given. For TMA travel time prediction, a case study of Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GHM-GBA), a typical MAS which contains five major airports closely located within 120km, is carried out using actual historical 4D trajectory data. Finally, Using two months 4D trajectories data, PEK to ZGSZ, the result exhibits the best accuracy, a measurement we define for prediction, of the longterm prediction of ETA given departure time is 92%, and mean absolute error (MAE) is 6.09 minutes.