Jilin Song

Ke Liu, Kaijing Ding, Xi Cheng et al.

Since flight delay hurts passengers, airlines, and airports, its prediction becomes crucial for the decision-making of all stakeholders in the aviation industry and thus has been attempted by various previous research. However, previous delay predictions are often categorical and at a highly aggregated level. To improve that, this study proposes to apply the novel Temporal Fusion Transformer model and predict numerical airport arrival delays at quarter hour level for U.S. top 30 airports. Inputs to our model include airport demand and capacity forecasts, historic airport operation efficiency information, airport wind and visibility conditions, as well as enroute weather and traffic conditions. The results show that our model achieves satisfactory performance measured by small prediction errors on the test set. In addition, the interpretability analysis of the model outputs identifies the important input factors for delay prediction.

Ke Liu, Fan Hu, Hui Lin et al.

This paper explores the optimization of Ground Delay Programs (GDP), a prevalent Traffic Management Initiative used in Air Traffic Management (ATM) to reconcile capacity and demand discrepancies at airports. Employing Reinforcement Learning (RL) to manage the inherent uncertainties in the national airspace system-such as weather variability, fluctuating flight demands, and airport arrival rates-we developed two RL models: Behavioral Cloning (BC) and Conservative Q-Learning (CQL). These models are designed to enhance GDP efficiency by utilizing a sophisticated reward function that integrates ground and airborne delays and terminal area congestion. We constructed a simulated single-airport environment, SAGDP_ENV, which incorporates real operational data along with predicted uncertainties to facilitate realistic decision-making scenarios. Utilizing the whole year 2019 data from Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR), our models aimed to preemptively set airport program rates. Despite thorough modeling and simulation, initial outcomes indicated that the models struggled to learn effectively, attributed potentially to oversimplified environmental assumptions. This paper discusses the challenges encountered, evaluates the models' performance against actual operational data, and outlines future directions to refine RL applications in ATM.