Transport causality knowledge-guided GCN for propagated delay prediction in airport delay propagation networks

Abstract

Flight delays pose a worldwide challenge that significantly affect the safety and efficiency of air transportation systems. However, propagated delay prediction, as well as its causality among airport delay propagation networks, has not considered some crucial issues regarding spatiotemporal dependence and propagation relationships. Thus, this study proposes a transport causality knowledge-guided extended graph convolutional network (GCN) framework to tackle these issues. In particular, a causality knowledge-guided airport delay propagation network (ADPN) is developed using the second modified transfer entropy (SMTE) principle. Furthermore, a causality-embedded adjacency matrix is utilized by an extended GCN for propagated delay prediction. Comprehensive validations and results indicate that the proposed method benefits significantly from the causality knowledge, and increases the prediction performances up to 15.51%. Thus, transport causality is significant and efficient for understanding propagated delay features and airport delay propagation network characteristics.