A data-driven method for flight time estimation based on air traffic pattern identification and prediction

Flight time estimation is expected to play a crucial role in predicting the Estimated Time of Arrival, which could help detect conflicts and manage arrivals. This paper proposes a novel data-driven method for flight time estimation based on arrival pattern identification and prediction. Firstly, a trajectory clustering algorithm is employed to group the arrival trajectories into different arrival patterns. A new trajectory representation technique is presented during the clustering process for better-describing arrival patterns. Secondly, we extract features from radar tracks for data-driven flight time estimation. These features consist of current states related, historical information related, traffic situation related, and environmental conditions related features. Furthermore, the permutation feature importance and recursive feature elimination method are adopted to reduce feature dimensions. Then, we develop three widely used tree-based models to estimate the flight time for each arrival pattern. We also propose an image-based flight patterns prediction method to classify each new arrival aircraft into the corresponding arrival pattern for actual operation. Finally, we take the Guangzhou arrival operation as a case to validate our proposed method. The results indicate that our proposed method could improve flight time estimating accuracy. Besides, through the data-driven strategy, we could also find several significant factors affecting the flight time within the Terminal Maneuvering Area.