From Time Series to State: Situation-Aware Modeling for Air Traffic Flow Prediction

TL;DR

AeroSense introduces a novel state-to-flow modeling framework for air traffic prediction that directly utilizes real-time aircraft states, outperforming traditional time series methods in accuracy and robustness.

Contribution

The paper presents AeroSense, a new approach that explicitly models real-time aircraft states with a dynamic set representation and attention mechanisms for improved air traffic flow prediction.

Findings

AeroSense achieves state-of-the-art prediction accuracy on real-world data.

The framework demonstrates robustness during peak traffic periods.

Attention visualizations offer interpretability of aircraft interactions.

Abstract

Accurate air traffic prediction in the terminal airspace (TA) is pivotal for proactive air traffic management (ATM). However, existing data-driven approaches predominantly rely on time series-based forecasting paradigms, which inherently overlook critical aircraft state information, such as real-time kinematics and proximity to airspace boundaries. To address this limitation, we propose \textit{AeroSense}, a direct state-to-flow modeling framework for air traffic prediction. Unlike classical time series-based methods that first aggregate aircraft trajectories into macroscopic flow sequences before modeling, AeroSense explicitly represents the real-time airspace situation as \textit{a dynamic set of aircraft states}, enabling the direct processing of a variable number of aircraft instead of time series as inputs. Specifically, we introduce a situation-aware state representation that enables AeroSense to sense the instantaneous terminal airspace situation directly from microscopic aircraft states. Furthermore, we design a model architecture that incorporates masked self-attention to capture inter-aircraft interactions, together with two decoupled prediction heads to model heterogeneous flow dynamics across two key functional areas of the TA. Extensive experiments on a large-scale real-world airport dataset demonstrate that AeroSense consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, validating that direct modeling of microscopic aircraft states yields substantially higher predictive fidelity than time series-based baselines. Moreover, the proposed framework exhibits superior robustness during peak traffic periods, achieves Pareto-optimal performance under dayparting multi-object evaluation, and provides meaningful interpretability through attention-based visualizations.