A Novel Trajectory Prediction Method Based on CNN, BiLSTM, and Multi-Head Attention Mechanism

A four-dimensional (4D) trajectory is a multi-dimensional time series that embodies rich spatiotemporal features. However, its high complexity and inherent uncertainty pose significant challenges for accurate prediction. In this paper, we present a novel 4D trajectory prediction model that integrates convolutional neural networks (CNNs), bidirectional long short-term memory networks (BiLSTMs), and multi-head attention mechanisms. This model effectively addresses the characteristics of aircraft flight trajectories and the difficulties associated with simultaneously extracting spatiotemporal features using existing prediction methods. Specifically, we leverage the local feature extraction capabilities of CNNs to extract key spatial and temporal features from the original trajectory data, such as geometric shape information and dynamic change patterns. The BiLSTM network is employed to consider both forward and backward temporal orders in the trajectory data, allowing for a more comprehensive capture of long-term dependencies. Furthermore, we introduce a multi-head attention mechanism that enhances the model’s ability to accurately identify key information in the trajectory data while minimizing the interference of redundant information. We validated our approach through experiments conducted on a real ADS-B trajectory dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms comparative approaches in terms of trajectory estimation accuracy.