Four-Dimensional Aircraft Trajectory Prediction with a Generative Deep Learning and Clustering Approach

Medium- and long-term four-dimensional (4D) aircraft trajectory prediction (TP) is a critical technology in air traffic management (ATM). This paper addresses the issue of existing medium- and long-term TP methods that are difficult to accurately fit aircraft trajectory data distributions. We propose a 4D TP method based on K-medoids clustering and conditional tabular generative adversarial networks (CTGAN), called C-CTGAN. Comparative experiments with four long short-term memory (LSTM)-based models and the original CTGAN model show that the proposed model’s TP accuracy is significantly higher than others when predicting medium- and long-term trajectories. When using the trajectory datasets without holding and a prediction time span of 10 min, compared to the convolutional neural network (CNN)-LSTM model, the C-CTGAN model reduces the mean absolute errors (MAEs) of core trajectory parameters, such as latitude, longitude, geometric altitude, and ground speed, by 69.89, 15.00, 74.07, and 84.21%, respectively. Compared to the original CTGAN model, the MAE is reduced by 20.43, 39.09, 31.98, and 17.07%, respectively. When using the trajectory datasets with holding, compared to the CNN-LSTM model, the C-CTGAN model shows MAE reductions of 14.08, 23.68, 31.46, and 2.86%, respectively. Compared to the original CTGAN, the reduction is 34.88, 2.69, 23.16, and 73.91%, respectively.