New Reliability Studies of Data-Driven Aircraft Trajectory Prediction

Abstract

Two main factors, including regression accuracy and adversarial attack robustness, of six trajectory prediction models are measured in this paper using the traffic flow management system (TFMS) public dataset of fixed-wing aircraft trajectories in a specific route provided by the Federal Aviation Administration. Six data-driven regressors with their desired architectures, from basic conventional to advanced deep learning, are explored in terms of the accuracy and reliability of their predicted trajectories. The main contribution of the paper is that the existence of adversarial samples was characterized for an aircraft trajectory problem, which is recast as a regression task in this paper. In other words, although data-driven algorithms are currently the best regressors, it is shown that they can be attacked by adversarial samples. Adversarial samples are similar to training samples; however, they can cause finely trained regressors to make incorrect predictions, which poses a security concern for learning-based trajectory prediction algorithms. It is shown that although deep-learning-based algorithms (e.g., long short-term memory (LSTM)) have higher regression accuracy with respect to conventional classifiers (e.g., support vector regression (SVR)), they are more sensitive to crafted states, which can be carefully manipulated even to redirect their predicted states towards incorrect states. This fact poses a real security issue for aircraft as adversarial attacks can result in intentional and purposely designed collisions of built-in systems that can include any type of learning-based trajectory predictor.