The world-wide aviation system is one of the most complex dynamical systems ever developed and is generating data at an extremely rapid rate. Most modern commercial aircraft record several hundred flight parameters including information from the guidance, navigation, and control systems, the avionics and propulsion systems, and the pilot inputs into the aircraft. These parameters may be continuous measurements or binary or categorical measurements recorded in one second intervals for the duration of the flight. Currently, most approaches to aviation safety are reactive, meaning that they are designed to react to an aviation safety incident or accident. In this paper, we discuss a novel approach based on the theory of multiple kernel learning to detect potential safety anomalies in very large data bases of discrete and continuous data from world-wide operations of commercial fleets. We pose a general anomaly detection problem which includes both discrete and continuous data streams, where we assume that the discrete streams have a causal influence on the continuous streams. We also assume that atypical sequences of events in the discrete streams can lead to off-nominal system performance. We discuss the application domain, novel algorithms, and also discuss results on real-world data sets. Our algorithm uncovers operationally significant events in high dimensional data streams in the aviation industry which are not detectable using state of the art methods.
Abstract-This paper presents a framework aimed at monitoring the behavior of aircraft in a given airspace. Nominal trajectories are determined and learned using data driven methods. Standard procedures are used by air traffic controllers (ATC) to guide aircraft, ensure the safety of the airspace, and to maximize the runway occupancy. Even though standard procedures are used by ATC, the control of the aircraft remains with the pilots, leading to a large variability in the flight patterns observed. Two methods to identify typical operations and their variability from recorded radar tracks are presented. This knowledge base is then used to monitor the conformance of current operations against operations previously identified as standard. A tool called AirTrajectoryMiner is presented, aiming at monitoring the instantaneous health of the airspace, in real time. The airspace is "healthy" when all aircraft are flying according to the nominal procedures. A measure of complexity is introduced, measuring the conformance of current flight to nominal flight patterns. When an aircraft does not conform, the complexity increases as more attention from ATC is required to ensure a safe separation between aircraft.
In the analysis and prediction of real-world systems, two of the key problems are nonstationarity (often in the form of switching between regimes), and overfitting (particularly serious for noisy processes). This article addresses these problems using gated experts, consisting of a (nonlinear) gating network, and several (also nonlinear) competing experts. Each expert learns to predict the conditional mean, and each expert adapts its width to match the noise level in its regime. The gating network learns to predict the probability of each expert, given the input. This article focuses on the case where the gating network bases its decision on information from the inputs. This can be contrasted to hidden Markov models where the decision is based on the previous state(s) (i.e. on the output of the gating network at the previous time step), as well as to averaging over several predictors. In contrast, gated experts soft-partition the input space, only learning to model their region. This article discusses the underlying statistical assumptions, derives the weight update rules, and compares the performance of gated experts to standard methods on three time series: (1) a computer-generated series, obtained by randomly switching between two nonlinear processes; (2) a time series from the Santa Fe Time Series Competition (the light intensity of a laser in chaotic state); and (3) the daily electricity demand of France, a real-world multivariate problem with structure on several time scales. The main results are: (1) the gating network correctly discovers the different regimes of the process; (2) the widths associated with each expert are important for the segmentation task (and they can be used to characterize the sub-processes); and (3) there is less overfitting compared to single networks (homogeneous multilayer perceptrons), since the experts learn to match their variances to the (local) noise levels. This can be viewed as matching the local complexity of the model to the local complexity of the data.
The airline industry is moving toward proactive risk management, which aims to identify and mitigate risks before accidents occur. However, existing methods for such efforts are limited. They rely on predefined criteria to identify risks, leaving emergent issues undetected. This paper presents a new method-ClusterAD-Flightwhich can support domain experts in detecting anomalies and associated risks from routine airline operations. The new method, enabled by data from the flight data recorder, applies clustering techniques to detect abnormal flights of unique data patterns. Compared with existing methods, the new method no longer requires predefined criteria or domain knowledge. Tests were conducted using two sets of operational data consisted of 365 B777 flights and 25519 A320 flights. The performance of ClusterAD-Flight was compared with those of Multiple Kernel Anomaly Detection (MKAD), another data-driven anomaly detection algorithm in recent years, and with Exceedance Detection (ED), the current method employed by the airline industry. Results showed that both ClusterAD-Flight and MKAD were able to identify operationally significant anomalies, surpassing the capability of ED. ClusterAD-Flight performed better with continuous parameters, while MKAD was more sensitive towards discrete parameters. Nomenclature v = high-dimensional vector to represent a flight x i j = value of the i th flight parameter at sample time j
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.