A Framework to Evaluate Aircraft Trajectory Generation Methods

Aircraft trajectory generation is a widely addressed problem with applications including emergency trajectory generation, collision risk models, air traffic flow and capacity management or airspace design. State of the art methods to generate individual trajectories and optimise some performance or emergency criterion may lack of realism with respect to common situations implemented by air traffic controllers. On the other hand, statistical data-driven methods to generate aircraft trajectories excel at imitating operational practice but may be difficult to implement even in simulations due to aircraft performance limitations. This contribution proposes a common baseline to compare literature and bleeding-edge methods to generate air traffic trajectories. Keeping in mind that the most appropriate criterion should always depend on the targeted application, we present here an extensive set of metrics to evaluate the quality of generated trajectories, before assessing two generation methods in light of these indicators.