A Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning Approach for Realistic Aircraft Taxi-Speed Modeling

Classical approaches for modelling aircraft taxi-speed assume constant speed or use a turning rate function to approximate taxi-timings for taxiing aircraft. However, those approaches cannot predict spatio-temporal component of aircraft-taxi trajectory due to a lack of consideration of the complexity and stochasticity of airport-airside movements and interactions. This research adopts the Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning (GAIL) algorithm for aircraft taxi-speed modelling, while considering multiple operational factors including surrounding traffic on the ground and target take-off time. The proposed model can learn and reproduce the ground movement patterns in a real-world dataset under different circumstances. In addition, the characteristics of the taxi-speed model are also analyzed, especially focusing on handling conflict scenarios with surrounding traffic. Finally, the travel-time of the aircraft from starting to target positions are compared with baseline models and actual taxiing data. The proposed model outperforms all the baseline models with a significant margin. In terms of spatial completion (SC), it achieves up to 97.1% for arrivals and 88.3% for departures. The results also show significantly high performance for temporal completion. The model achieves a stable performance with low Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) (16.8 seconds for arrivals, 32.4 seconds for departures) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) (4.4% for arrivals and 7.6% for departures). Our model’s errors are 72% lower for arrivals and 48% lower for departures when compared to other baseline models.