Flight trajectory prediction for air traffic management

Abstract

With the ever-increasing volume of air traffic, strategic air traffic flow is a prerequisite requirement for effective functioning and transit of flights. Air traffic management is a term in the aviation industry that encompasses all the systems that work towards assisting an aircraft in the course of its departure, transit, and landing. The airspace management is to maneuver through the dangerous and fatal airspace sectors to make a safe flight experience for the on-board passengers and the aircraft itself. The objective concerns with identifying the hazardous areas in the airspace and avoiding them in the due course of the flight trajectory. The points of trajectory are predicted and computation with the help of continuously changing weather information. Clustering is used on the historical flight trajectories to classify the flight traffic into major groups based on similarity measures. Using these clusters, the Intent-based model predicts flight path and suggests an alternative path in case of the presence of a weather anomaly in the original flight path.