Research on Safety Prediction of Sector Traffic Operation Based on a Long Short Term Memory Model

Abstract

Traffic safety has been thought of as a basic feature of transportation, recent developments in civil aviation have emphasized the need for risk identification and safety prediction. This study aims to increase en-route flight safety through the development of prediction models for flight conflicts. Firstly, flight conflicts time series and traffic parameters are extracted from historical ADS-B data. In the second step, a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model is trained to make a one-step-ahead prediction on the flight conflict time series. The results show that the LSTM model has the greatest prediction effect (MAE 0.3901) with comparison to other models. Based on that, we add traffic parameters (volume, density, velocity) into the LSTM model as new input variables and issue a comprehensive analysis of the relative predictive power of traffic parameters. The accuracy of prediction model is validated with a mean error of less than 3%. Based on the improvements of model performance brought by traffic parameters, LSTM models with a single traffic parameter are proposed for further discussion. The results illustrate that volume is the most important factor in promoting prediction accuracy and density has an advantage of improvement in the aspect of model stability.