Causal Discovery of Flight Service Process Based on Event Sequence

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel framework for discovering causal relationships in flight ground support processes directly from event logs, addressing limitations of existing models and uncovering true causes of flight delays.

Contribution

It proposes a new causal discovery framework that does not assume causal sufficiency, utilizing a fuzzy mining model and a local causal discovery algorithm tested on real flight data.

Findings

Effective causal factors identified without assuming causal sufficiency

New Markov blanket discovery algorithm developed and validated

Framework reveals true causes behind flight delays

Abstract

The development of the civil aviation industry has continuously increased the requirements for the efficiency of airport ground support services. In the existing ground support research, there has not yet been a process model that directly obtains support from the ground support log to study the causal relationship between service nodes and flight delays. Most ground support studies mainly use machine learning methods to predict flight delays, and the flight support model they are based on is an ideal model. The study did not conduct an in-depth study of the causal mechanism behind the ground support link and did not reveal the true cause of flight delays. Therefore, there is a certain deviation in the prediction of flight delays by machine learning, and there is a certain deviation between the ideal model based on the research and the actual service process. Therefore, it is of practical significance to obtain the process model from the guarantee log and analyze its causality. However, the existing process causal factor discovery methods only do certain research when the assumption of causal sufficiency is established and does not consider the existence of latent variables. Therefore, this article proposes a framework to realize the discovery of process causal factors without assuming causal sufficiency. The optimized fuzzy mining process model is used as the service benchmark model, and the local causal discovery algorithm is used to discover the causal factors. Under this framework, this paper proposes a new Markov blanket discovery algorithm that does not assume causal sufficiency to discover causal factors and uses benchmark data sets for testing. Finally, the actual flight service data is used.