Database Reference
In-Depth Information
12
Air Traffic Analysis
Christophe Hurter, Gennady Andrienko, Natalia Andrienko,
Ralf Hartmut Guting, and Mahmoud Sakr
12.1 Introduction
The goal of air traffic control (ATC) is tomaximize both safety and capacity, so as
to accept all flights without compromising the life of the passengers or creating
delays. Because air traffic is expected to double by 2030, new visualizations
and analysis tools have to be developed to maintain and further improve the
safety level. To do so, air traffic practitioners analyze data from the ATC activity.
These multidimensional data include aircraft trajectories (3D location plus time),
flight routes (ordered sequences of spatio-temporal points that represent planned
routes), and meteorological data. In this chapter, we detail the relevant tasks of
ATC practitioners and demonstrate recent visualization and query methods to
fulfill them.
The special properties of ATC data propose new challenges and, at the same
time, new opportunities of data analysis. The semantics of the data are rich
because they includes the third dimension (altitude), which can be used to
discover salient events such as takeoffs and landings. More semantics can be
added by augmenting background data such as the traffic network and the
meteorological data. ATC data sets are characterized by their large sizes, adding
more challenges to the analysis. Trajectory analysis is difficult due to the data set
size and to the fact that it contains many errors and uncertainties. One day's traffic
over France contains about 20,000 trajectories (
>
1 million records). Recording
is done in a periodic manner (in our database: a radar plot, per aircraft, every 4
minutes), but a plot can be missed, or have erroneous data because of physical
problems that occur at the time of recording.
This chapter demonstrates recent works of trajectory analysis. Three tech-
niques are demonstrated: direct manipulation, visual analytics, and moving
object database queries. Direct manipulation visually represents the raw trajec-
tories, and allows the user to efficiently explore them and highlight interesting
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