Hierarchical Method for Mining a Prevailing Flight Pattern in Airport Terminal Airspace

Due to the variety of flight patterns in airport terminal airspace, as well as the high global similarity of different flight patterns entering and leaving from the same runway or corridor, it is difficult for current mainstream methods to achieve good clustering. To this end, this paper first constructs a truncated dynamic time warping (TDTW) trajectory similarity measurement to characterize different trajectory patterns with high global similarity and large local differences. Furthermore, a hierarchical flight pattern mining method is proposed, which is divided into four layers according to different characteristics. The first three layers of the method classify trajectories according to takeoff and landing types, runways, and corridors; whereas the fourth layer uses a [Formula: see text]-medoid clustering method based on TDTW, thereby making the mining process more controllable and in line with actual operation. Compared to dynamic time warping, the experimental results show that the intraclass compactness and interclass separation of the cluster obtained by the proposed method have decreased and increased by 44.6 and 20.1%, respectively, and the overall performance has improved by 54.1%. More refined and reasonable flight patterns have been obtained.