Flight trajectory grafting: leveraging historical trajectories for more efficient arrival air traffic management
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Louie, Richard
Tai, Tak Shing
Liem, Rhea P
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Inside the terminal maneuvering area (TMA), flight trajectories need to be determined to maintain safe and efficient arrival operations. Air traffic control officers (ATCOs) devise trajectories and provide instructions to pilots. The subjectivity involved in the decision-making exposes operational efficiency to factors such as workload, experience, and TMA complexity. Suboptimal trajectory solutions can increase arrival transit times, i.e., the time spent from entering TMA to landing, leading to congestion and flight delays. These adverse effects are particularly critical during peak hours. While existing methods provide efficient trajectory solutions, they often overlook critical embedded features that constitute trajectory solution feasibility in real operations. To address these challenges, we propose a trajectory grafting method to generate high-fidelity, feature-embedded trajectories compatible with existing air traffic management systems. Trajectory grafting utilizes historical trajectory segments as components to construct situational flight trajectories that conform to given traffic dynamics and constraints. Collectively, these trajectory segments constitute a feasible design space, thereby eliminating the need to explicitly model operational constraints, flight physics, and ATCOs’ workload. Our results demonstrate the benefits of this method, which reduces the average arrival transit time by 3% during peak hours. The benefits are further amplified by its compound effect, with up to 24% reductions in accumulated arrival transit times.
Date Issued
2025-06-01
Date Acceptance
2025-05-09
Citation
Journal of the Air Transport Research Society, 2025, 4
ISSN
2941-198X
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Journal / Book Title
Journal of the Air Transport Research Society
Volume
4
Copyright Statement
© 2025 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. on behalf of Air Transport Research Society. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Identifier
10.1016/j.jatrs.2025.100072
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
100072
Date Publish Online
2025-05-26