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A Framework to Evaluate Aircraft Trajectory Generation Methods

Paper ID

ATM-2021-025

Conference

USA/Europe ATM R&D Seminar

Year

2021

Theme

Trajectory planning

Project Name

Keywords:

Air Traffic Management, evaluation, simulation, statistical methods, trajectory generation

Authors

Xavier Olive, Junzi Sun, Mayara Condé Rocha Murça and Timothé Krauth

DOI

Project Number

Abstract

Aircraft trajectory generation is a widely addressed problem with applications including emergency trajectory generation, collision risk models, air traffic flow and capacity management or airspace design. State of the art methods to generate individual trajectories and optimise some performance or emergency criterion may lack of realism with respect to common situations implemented by air traffic controllers. On the other hand, statistical data-driven methods to generate aircraft trajectories excel at imitating operational practice but may be difficult to implement even in simulations due to aircraft performance limitations. This contribution proposes a common baseline to compare literature and bleeding-edge methods to generate air traffic trajectories. Keeping in mind that the most appropriate criterion should always depend on the targeted application, we present here an extensive set of metrics to evaluate the quality of generated trajectories, before assessing two generation methods in light of these indicators.