Stochastic conformal anomaly detection and resolution for air traffic control

Abstract

Safety is of the utmost importance in the air traffic system. In recent years, data-driven algorithms have emerged to identify anomalous and potentially unsafe operations based on machine learning techniques. Although many algorithms have shown notable progress in anomaly detection, they have hardly considered the fact that data can be corrupted by noise and uncertainty (e.g., navigation system error) can lead to frequent misdetection and false alarms, which could disturb air traffic controllers and result in system performance degradation. Therefore, an accurate and reliable assessment of emerging safety risks that accounts for and alleviates the effect of uncertainty in data is required for safe and efficient airspace operations. To achieve this goal, this paper proposes a conformal prediction-based framework that explicitly examines uncertainty for reliable anomaly detection and learns online from new streaming data. In addition to supporting the monitoring task of air traffic controllers, the proposed method takes one step forward and provides support for the control task, by offering a resolution strategy when anomaly probability violates the predefined threshold. The proposed method is demonstrated with real air traffic data, called automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast data.