Aircraft Trajectory Clustering in Terminal Airspace Based on Deep Autoencoder and Gaussian Mixture Model

The aircraft trajectory clustering analysis in the terminal airspace is conducive to determining the representative route structure of the arrival and departure trajectory and extracting their typical patterns, which is important for air traffic management such as airspace structure optimization, trajectory planning, and trajectory prediction. However, the current clustering methods perform poorly due to the large flight traffic, high density, and complex airspace structure in the terminal airspace. In recent years, the continuous development of Deep Learning has demonstrated its powerful ability to extract internal potential features of large dataset. Therefore, this paper mainly tries a deep trajectory clustering method based on deep autoencoder (DAE). To this end, this paper proposes a trajectory clustering method based on deep autoencoder (DAE) and Gaussian mixture model (GMM) to mine the prevailing traffic flow patterns in the terminal airspace. The DAE is trained to extract feature representations from historical high-dimensional trajectory data. Subsequently, the output of DAE is input into GMM for clustering. This paper takes the terminal airspace of Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport in China as a case to verify the proposed method. Through the direct visualization and dimensionality reduction visualization of the clustering results, it is found that the traffic flow patterns identified by the clustering method in this paper are intuitive and separable.