Hybrid Machine Learning and Estimation-Based Flight Trajectory Prediction in Terminal Airspace

For air traffic management, trajectory prediction plays an important role as the predicted trajectory information is used in crucial tasks for the safety and efficiency of air traffic operations, such as conflict detection and resolution, scheduling, and sequencing. In this paper, we propose a framework for trajectory prediction in terminal airspace by combining a machine learning-based method and a physics-based estimation method. A trajectory prediction model based on machine learning is trained from historical surveillance data to represent the collective behavior of a set of flight trajectories, from which the data-driven prediction can be obtained as the expected future behavior of an incoming flight. A physics-based estimation algorithm called Residual-Mean Interacting Multiple Models (RM-IMM) then incorporates the machine learning prediction as a pseudo-measurement to account for the current motion of the aircraft. The proposed framework is tested, with real air traffic surveillance data, by predicting the future state information of the flights for real-time air traffic control applications. The results show that the proposed framework produces a greatly improved prediction accuracy compared to the two existing machine learning-based algorithms.