Abstract
Aircraft trajectory prediction is challenging because of the flight process with uncertain kinematic motion and varying dynamics, which is characterized by intricate temporal dependencies of the flight surveillance data. To address these challenges, this study proposes a novel hybrid prediction framework, the IMM-Informer, which integrates an interacting multiple model (IMM) approach with the deep learning-based Informer model. The IMM processes flight tracking with multiple typical motion models to produce the initial state predictions. Within the Informer framework, the encoder captures the temporal features with the ProbSparse self-attention mechanism, and the decoder generates trajectory deviation predictions. A final fusion combines the IMM estimators with Informer correction outputs and leverages their respective strengths to achieve accurate and robust predictions. The experiments are conducted using real flight surveillance data received from automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) sensors to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results demonstrate that the IMM-Informer framework has notable prediction error reductions and significantly outperforms the prediction accuracies of the standalone sequence prediction network models.