Artificial neural network models for airport capacity prediction

Abstract

This paper proposes artificial neural network models to predict the arrival/departure capacity of airports. Multilayer perceptron (MLP), recurrent neural networks (RNN), and long short-term memory (LSTM) models have been trained using capacity and meteorological data from Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL) from 2013 to 2017. The models’ predictive performances were validated against the observed capacity of ATL in 2018. The qualitative and quantitative analysis of the trained models confirmed that the artificial neural networks approach is effective in predicting airport capacity. In addition, the transferability of the models for Boston Logan International Airport (BOS) is examined. Capacity prediction performance for BOS measures the transferability of the models trained with the ATL data. MLP showed good transferability without taking any other measures, and RNN and LSTM were able to predict the BOS capacity well after fine-tuning.