SIA-FTP: A Spoken Instruction Aware Flight Trajectory Prediction Framework

Ground-air negotiation via speech communication is a vital prerequisite for ensuring safety and efficiency in air traffic control (ATC) operations. However, with the increase in traffic flow, incorrect instructions caused by human factors bring a great threat to ATC safety. Existing flight trajectory prediction (FTP) approaches primarily rely on the flight status of historical trajectory, leading to significant delays in the prediction of real-time maneuvering instruction, which is not conducive to conflict detection. A major reason is that spoken instructions and flight trajectories are presented in different modalities in the current air traffic control (ATC) system, bringing great challenges to considering the maneuvering instruction in the FTP tasks. In this paper, a spoken instruction-aware FTP framework, called SIA-FTP, is innovatively proposed to support high-maneuvering FTP tasks by incorporating instant spoken instruction. To address the modality gap and minimize the data requirements, a 3-stage learning paradigm is proposed to implement the SIA-FTP framework in a progressive manner, including trajectory-based FTP pretraining, intent-oriented instruction embedding learning, and multi-modal finetuning. Specifically, the FTP model and the instruction embedding with maneuvering semantics are pre-trained using volumes of well-resourced trajectory and text data in the 1st and 2nd stages. In succession, a multi-modal fusion strategy is proposed to incorporate the pre-trained instruction embedding into the FTP model and integrate the two pre-trained networks into a joint model. Finally, the joint model is finetuned using the limited trajectory-instruction data to enhance the FTP performance within maneuvering instruction scenarios. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed framework presents an impressive performance improvement in high-maneuvering scenarios.