Objectives: The objective of the presented work is to present novel methods for big data
exploration in the Air Traffic Control (ATC) domain. Data is formed by sets of airplane trajectories,
or trails, which in turn records the positions of an aircraft in a given airspace at
several time instants, and additional information such as flight height, speed, fuel consumption,
and metadata (e.g. flight ID). Analyzing and understanding this time-dependent
data poses several non-trivial challenges to information visualization.
Materials and methods: To address this Big Data challenge, we present a set of novel
methods to analyze aircraft trajectories with interactive image-based information visualization
techniques.As a result, we address the scalability challenges in terms of data manipulation
and open questions by presenting a set of related visual analysis methods that focus
on decision-support in the ATC domain. All methods use image-based techniques, in order
to outline the advantages of such techniques in our application context, and illustrated by
means of use-cases from the ATC domain.
Results: For each considered use-case, we outline the type of questions posed by domain
experts, data involved in addressing these questions, and describe the specific image-based
techniques we used to address these questions. Further, for each of the proposed techniques,
we describe the visual representation and interaction mechanisms that have been
used to address the above-mentioned goals. We illustrate these use-cases with real-life
datasets from the ATC domain, and show how our techniques can help end-users in the
ATC domain discover new insights, and solve problems, involving the presented dataset