Airport Capacity Prediction With Multisource Features: A Temporal Deep Learning Approach

Accurate airport capacity estimation is crucial for the secure and orderly operation of the aviation system. However, such estimation is a non-trivial task as capacity depends on various meteorological and operational features. The complex coupling characteristics among these multi-source features have proved to be challenging for most of the traditional regression models. Recently, enhanced by its excellent ability to mine nonlinear relationships, the machine learning methods trigger widely applications. However, due to the imbalance of features scatter and the neglect of temporal dependences in aviation systems, existing machine learning methods for airport capacity prediction still have room for improvement. In light of these, this paper presents a novel airport capacity prediction method based on the multi-channel fusion Transformer model (MF-Transformer). Besides the commonly used aviation features, we unprecedentedly harness the power of the high-dimensional meteorological feature for accurate prediction. As to the model, we construct a multi-channel feature fusion structure, which includes a three-channel network for multi-source features extraction and an attention-based feature fusion module between channels. In each channel, the Transformer-based model is utilized to capture the temporal dependences of features. We conduct experiments on the capacity prediction tasks of the Beijing Capital International Airport which is the largest airport in China and verify that the proposed MF-Transformer outperforms benchmarks under different prediction horizons.