Deep Learning Architecture for Flight Flow Spatiotemporal Prediction in Airport Network

Traffic flow prediction is a significant component for the new generation intelligent transportation. In the field of air transportation, accurate prediction of airport flight flow can help airlines schedule flights and provide a decision-making basis for airport resource allocation. With the help of Deep Learning technology, this paper focuses on the characteristics of flight flow easily disturbed by environmental factors, studies the spatiotemporal dependence between flight flows, and predicts the spatiotemporal distribution of flight flows from the airport network level. We proposed a deep learning architecture named ATFSTNP, which combining the residual neural network (ResNet), graph convolutional network (GCN), and long short-term memory (LSTM). Based big data analytics of air traffic management, this method takes the spatiotemporal causal relationship between weather impact and flight flow as the core, and deeply mines the complex spatiotemporal relationship of flight flow. The model’s methodologies are improved from the practical application level, and extensive experiments conducted on the China’s flight operation dataset. The results illustrate that the improved model has significant advantages in predicting the flight flow under weather affect. Even in the complex and variable external environment, the model can still accurately predict the spatiotemporal distribution of the airport network flight flow, with strong robustness.