Aircraft taxi time prediction: Comparisons and insights

• Important problem for researchers and practitioners at airports.
• Improves accuracy for taxi time predictions for aircraft.
• Analysis compares different regression approaches to determine the best.
• A TSK fuzzy rule-based system outperformed the other approaches.
• New insights: dependencies of distance and amount of traffic upon taxi-in times.

The predicted growth in air transportation and the ambitious goal of the European Commission to have on-time performance of flights within 1 min makes efficient and predictable ground operations at airports indispensable. Accurately predicting taxi times of arrivals and departures serves as an important key task for runway sequencing, gate assignment and ground movement itself. This research tests different statistical regression approaches and also various regression methods which fall into the realm of soft computing to more accurately predict taxi times. Historic data from two major European airports is utilised for cross-validation. Detailed comparisons show that a TSK fuzzy rule-based system outperformed the other approaches in terms of prediction accuracy. Insights from this approach are then presented, focusing on the analysis of taxi-in times, which is rarely discussed in literature. The aim of this research is to unleash the power of soft computing methods, in particular fuzzy rule-based systems, for taxi time prediction problems. Moreover, we aim to show that, although these methods have only been recently applied to airport problems, they present promising and potential features for such problems.

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