A Simplified Framework for Air Route Clustering Based on ADS-B Data

TL;DR

This paper introduces a simplified framework for clustering air routes using ADS-B data, aiming to reduce computational costs in traffic flow management and improve operational efficiency.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel, simplified clustering framework that effectively identifies typical air routes from ADS-B data, aiding in traffic management and operational evaluation.

Findings

Successfully detected typical routes between airports

Reduced computational costs for air flow optimization

Combined quantitative indices with human judgment for validation

Abstract

The volume of flight traffic gets increasing over the time, which makes the strategic traffic flow management become one of the challenging problems since it requires a lot of computational resources to model entire traffic data. On the other hand, Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast (ADS-B) technology has been considered as a promising data technology to provide both flight crews and ground control staff the necessary information safely and efficiently about the position and velocity of the airplanes in a specific area. In the attempt to tackle this problem, we presented in this paper a simplified framework that can support to detect the typical air routes between airports based on ADS-B data. Specifically, the flight traffic will be classified into major groups based on similarity measures, which helps to reduce the number of flight paths between airports. As a matter of fact, our framework can be taken into account to reduce practically the computational cost for air flow optimization and evaluate the operational performance. Finally, in order to illustrate the potential applications of our proposed framework, an experiment was performed using ADS-B traffic flight data of three different pairs of airports. The detected typical routes between each couple of airports show promising results by virtue of combining two indices for measuring the clustering performance and incorporating human judgment into the visual inspection.