Learning to Land Anywhere: Transferable Generative Models for Aircraft Trajectories

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Larsen, Olav Finne Praesteng, Ruocco, Massimiliano, Spitieris, Michail, Murad, Abdulmajid, Ragosta, Martina
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866917064656027648
author Larsen, Olav Finne Praesteng
Ruocco, Massimiliano
Spitieris, Michail
Murad, Abdulmajid
Ragosta, Martina
author_facet Larsen, Olav Finne Praesteng
Ruocco, Massimiliano
Spitieris, Michail
Murad, Abdulmajid
Ragosta, Martina
contents Access to trajectory data is a key requirement for developing and validating Air Traffic Management (ATM) solutions, yet many secondary and regional airports face severe data scarcity. This limits the applicability of machine learning methods and the ability to perform large-scale simulations or "what-if" analyses. In this paper, we investigate whether generative models trained on data-rich airports can be efficiently adapted to data-scarce airports using transfer learning. We adapt state-of-the-art diffusion- and flow-matching-based architectures to the aviation domain and evaluate their transferability between Zurich (source) and Dublin (target) landing trajectory datasets. Models are pretrained on Zurich and fine-tuned on Dublin with varying amounts of local data, ranging from 0% to 100%. Results show that diffusion-based models achieve competitive performance with as little as 5% of the Dublin data and reach baseline-level performance around 20%, consistently outperforming models trained from scratch across metrics and visual inspections. Latent flow matching and latent diffusion models also benefit from pretraining, though with more variable gains, while flow matching models show weaker generalization. Despite challenges in capturing rare trajectory patterns, these findings demonstrate the potential of transfer learning to substantially reduce data requirements for trajectory generation in ATM, enabling realistic synthetic data generation even in environments with limited historical records.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_04155
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning to Land Anywhere: Transferable Generative Models for Aircraft Trajectories
Larsen, Olav Finne Praesteng
Ruocco, Massimiliano
Spitieris, Michail
Murad, Abdulmajid
Ragosta, Martina
Machine Learning
I.2.6; I.5.1
Access to trajectory data is a key requirement for developing and validating Air Traffic Management (ATM) solutions, yet many secondary and regional airports face severe data scarcity. This limits the applicability of machine learning methods and the ability to perform large-scale simulations or "what-if" analyses. In this paper, we investigate whether generative models trained on data-rich airports can be efficiently adapted to data-scarce airports using transfer learning. We adapt state-of-the-art diffusion- and flow-matching-based architectures to the aviation domain and evaluate their transferability between Zurich (source) and Dublin (target) landing trajectory datasets. Models are pretrained on Zurich and fine-tuned on Dublin with varying amounts of local data, ranging from 0% to 100%. Results show that diffusion-based models achieve competitive performance with as little as 5% of the Dublin data and reach baseline-level performance around 20%, consistently outperforming models trained from scratch across metrics and visual inspections. Latent flow matching and latent diffusion models also benefit from pretraining, though with more variable gains, while flow matching models show weaker generalization. Despite challenges in capturing rare trajectory patterns, these findings demonstrate the potential of transfer learning to substantially reduce data requirements for trajectory generation in ATM, enabling realistic synthetic data generation even in environments with limited historical records.
title Learning to Land Anywhere: Transferable Generative Models for Aircraft Trajectories
topic Machine Learning
I.2.6; I.5.1
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04155