An Adaptive Similar Scenario Matching Method for Predicting Aircraft Taxiing Time

Accurate prediction of taxiing time is important in ensuring efficient and safe operations on the airport surface. It helps improve ground operation efficiency, reduce fuel waste, and improve carbon emissions at the airport. In actual operations, taxiing time is influenced by various factors, including a large number of categorical features. However, few previous studies have focused on selecting such features. Additionally, traditional taxiing time prediction methods are often black-box models that only provide a single prediction result; they fail to provide effective practical references for controllers. Therefore, this paper analyses the features that affect taxiing time from different data types and forms a taxi feature set consisting of nine key features. We also propose a taxiing time prediction method based on adaptive scenario matching rules. This process classifies the scenarios into multiple typical historical scenario sets and adaptively matches the current target scenario to a typical scenario set based on quantified rules. Then, based on the matching results, a pre-trained model obtained from the corresponding scenario set is used to predict the taxiing time of an aircraft in the target scenario, aiming to mitigate the impact of data heterogeneity on prediction results. Experimental results show that compared to baseline methods, the mean absolute error and root mean square error of the proposed method decreased by 4.8% and 12.6%, respectively. This method significantly reduces the fluctuations in results caused by sample heterogeneity and enhances controllers’ acceptance of prediction results from the model. It can be used to further improve auxiliary decision making systems and enhance the precise control capabilities of airport surface operations.