Efficient Compression of 4D-Trajectory Data in Air Traffic Management

Air traffic management (ATM) is facing a tremendous increase in the amount of available flight data, particularly four-dimensional (4D) trajectories. Computational requirements for analysis and storage of such bulk of data are steeply increasing. Compression is one key technology to address this challenge. In this paper we propose two techniques for compressing air traffic 4D trajectories. Our first technique analyzes a set of samples and computes a prediction for the most likely picked successor coordinate by a random walker. The second technique, i.e., referential compression, compresses a 4D trajectory as a collection of subtrajectory pointers into a reference trajectory. We evaluate our algorithms on trajectory data from the Demand Data Repository provided by EUROCONTROL. We show that a combination of our referential and statistical compression techniques compresses 4D trajectories of all air traffic over Europe in the year 2013 from 60 GB down to 0.78 GB, achieving a compression ratio of more than 75 : 1. The compression ratio for our techniques increases with the number of to-be-compressed flights, whereas standard compression techniques achieve a fixed compressed ratio for any number of flights. Our work contributes toward efficient handling of the increasing amount of traffic data in ATM.