Improving the predictability of take-off times with Machine Learning : a case study for the Maastricht upper area control centre area of responsibility

The uncertainty of the take-off time is a major contribution to the loss of trajectory predictability. At present, the Estimated Take-Off Time (ETOT) for each individual flight is extracted from the Enhanced Traffic Flow Management System (ETFMS) messages, which are sent each time there is an event triggering a recalculation of the flight data by the Network Man- ager Operations Centre. However, aircraft do not always take- off at the ETOTs reported by the ETFMS due to several factors, including congestion and bad weather conditions at the departure airport, reactionary delays and air traffic flow management slot improvements. This paper presents two machine learning models that take into account several of these factors to improve the take- off time prediction of individual flights one hour before their estimated off-block time. Predictions performed by the model trained on three years of historical flight and weather data show a reduction on the take-off time prediction error of about 30% as compared to the ETOTs reported by the ETFMS.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Flight delays and associated factors, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta international airport

CENTERIS 2018 - International Conference on ENTERprise Information Systems / ProjMAN 2018 - International Conference on Project MANagement / HCist 2018 - International Conference on Health and Social Care Information Systems and Technologies, CENTERIS/ProjMAN/HCist 2018Nowadays, a downside to traveling is the delays that are constantly being advertised to passengers resulting in a decrease in customer satisfaction and causing costs. Consequently, there is a need to anticipate and mitigate the existence of delays helping airlines and airports improving their performance or even take consumer-oriented measures that can undo or attenuate the effect that these delays have on their passengers. This study has as main objective to predict the occurrence of delays in arrivals at the international airport of Hartsfield-Jackson. A Knowledge Discovery Database (KDD) methodology was followed, and several Data Mining techniques were applied. Historical data of the flight and weather, information of the airplane and propagation of the delay were gathered to train the model. To overcome the problem of unbalanced datasets, we applied different sampling techniques. To predict delays in individual flights we used Decision Trees, Random Forest and Multilayer Perceptron. Finally, each model's performance was evaluated and compared. The best model proved to be the Multilayer Perceptron with 85% of accuracy.publishersversionpublishe

A Machine Learning Approach Towards Analyzing Impact of Surface Weather on Expect Departure Clearance Times in Aviation

Commercial air travel in the United States has grown significantly in the past decade. While the reasons for air traffic delays can vary, the weather is the largest cause of flight cancellations and delays in the United States. Air Traffic Control centers utilize Traffic Management Initiatives such as Ground Stops and Expect Departure Clearance Times (EDCT) to manage traffic into and out of affected airports. Airline dispatchers and pilots monitor EDCTs to adjust flight blocks and flight schedules to reduce the impact on the airline’s operating network. The use of time-series data mining can be used to assess and quantify the impact of surface weather variables on EDCTs. A major hub airport in the United States, Charlotte Douglas International Airport, was chosen for the model development and assessment, and Vector Autoregression and Recurrent Neural Network models were developed. While both models were assessed to have demonstrated acceptable performance for the assessment, the Vector Autoregression outperformed the Recurrent Neural Network model. Weather variables up to six hours before the prediction time period were used to develop the proposed lasso regularized Vector Autoregression equation. Precipitation values were assessed to be the most significant predictors for EDCT values by the Vector Autoregression and Recurrent Neural Network models

Flight Delay Prediction Using a Hybrid Deep Learning Method

The operational effectiveness of airports and airlines greatly relies on punctuality. Many conventional machine learning and deep learning algorithms are applied in the analysis of air traffic data. However, the hybrid deep learning (HDL) model demonstrates great success with superior results in many complex problems, e.g. image classification and behaviour detection based on video data. Interestingly, no previous attempts have been made to apply the concept of HDL in analysing structured air traffic data before. Hence, this research investigates the effectiveness of the HDL in the departure delays severity prediction (i.e. on-time, delay and extremely delay) for 10 major airports in the U.S. that experience high ground and air congestion. The proposed HDL model is a combination of a feed-forward artificial neural network model with three hidden layers and a conventional gradient boosted tree model (XGBoost). Utilising the passenger flight on-time performance data from the U.S. Department of Transportation, the proposed HDL model achieves a sharp rise of 22.95% in accuracy when compared to a pure neural network model. However, with current data used in this research, a pure machine learning model achieves the best prediction accuracy

Enhancing Flight Delay Prediction through Feature Engineering in Machine Learning Classifiers: A Real Time Data Streams Case Study

The process of creating and selecting features from raw data to enhance the accuracy of machine learning models is referred to as feature engineering. In the context of real-time data streams, feature engineering becomes particularly important because the data is constantly changing and the model must be able to adapt quickly. A case study of using feature engineering in a flight information system is described in this paper. We used feature engineering to improve the performance of machine learning classifiers for predicting flight delays and describe various techniques for extracting and constructing features from the raw data, including time-based features, trend-based features, and error-based features. Before applying these techniques, we applied feature pre-processing techniques, including the CTAO algorithm for feature pre-processing, followed by the SCSO (Sand cat swarm optimization) algorithm for feature extraction and the Enhanced harmony search for feature optimization. The resultant feature set contained the 9 most relevant features for deciding whether a flight would be delayed or not. Additionally, we evaluate the performance of various classifiers using these engineered features and contrast the results with those obtained using raw features. The results show that feature engineering significantly improves the performance of the classifiers and allows for more accurate prediction of flight delays in real-time

Delays prediction using data mining techniques for supply chain risk management company

Project Work presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Knowledge Management and Business IntelligenceGlobalization makes competition in supply chain management more intense. Pressure on improving the efficiency, guarantee that goods arrive on time and reduce the cost of shipment became higher. Shipment passes through different continents and cultures, dispersed around the world and encounter different conditions and risks. These risks are unexpected events that might disrupt the flow of materials or the planned operations. It can be due to late delivery, inaccuracy in forecasting, natural disasters like hurricane and earthquake or sociocultural events like strike. An effective use of supply chain risk management methods which includes risk identification, risk assessment, risk mitigation, and risk control is important for the organization to survive. For that reason, I was part of a team in XXX organization who has a goal to develop a predictive model to predict shipment delays for company’s customers