Multi-faceted spatio-temporal network for weather-aware air traffic flow prediction in multi-airport system

As one of the core modules for air traffic flow management, Air Traffic Flow Prediction (ATFP) in the Multi-Airport System (MAS) is a prerequisite for demand and capacity balance in the complex meteorological environment. Due to the challenge of implicit interaction mechanism among traffic flow, airspace capacity and weather impact, the Weather-aware ATFP (Wa-ATFP) is still a nontrivial issue. In this paper, a novel Multi-faceted Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network (MSTGCN) is proposed to address the Wa-ATFP within the complex operations of MAS. Firstly, a spatio-temporal graph is constructed with three different nodes, including airport, route, and fix to describe the topology structure of MAS. Secondly, a weather-aware multi-faceted fusion module is proposed to integrate the feature of air traffic flow and the auxiliary features of capacity and weather, which can effectively address the complex impact of severe weather, e.g., thunderstorms. Thirdly, to capture the latent connections of nodes, an adaptive graph connection constructor is designed. The experimental results with the real-world operational dataset in Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, China, validate that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art machine-learning and deep-learning based baseline approaches in performance. The case study of convective weather scenarios further proves the adaptability of the proposed approach.