Detecting Events in Aircraft Trajectories: Rule-Based and Data-Driven Approaches

The large amount of aircraft trajectory data publicly available through open data sources like the OpenSky Network presents a wide range of possibilities for monitoring and post-operational analysis of air traffic performance. This contribution addresses the automatic identification of operational events associated with trajectories. This is a challenging task that can be tackled with both empirical, rule-based methods and statistical, data-driven approaches. In this paper, we first propose a taxonomy of significant events, including usual operations such as take-off, Instrument Landing System (ILS) landing and holding, as well as less usual operations like firefighting, in-flight refuelling and navigational calibration. Then, we introduce different rule-based and statistical methods for detecting a selection of these events. The goal is to compare candidate methods and to determine which of the approaches performs better in each situation.