Visualization and comparison of aircraft trajectories using Gaussian-Smoothed heatmaps
Joseph Burris, Kathryn Ballard, Sara Rosario Wilson, David J. Edwards · Quality Engineering · 2021
Thousands of airplanes traverse the national airspace every day. Each flight has a unique trajectory in space and time that is typically pre-determined by a flight plan and can be inflexible. With air traffic density expected to increase in the future, NASA has been conducting research on technology that allows flexibility for airplanes to fly more optimal trajectories that can save time and fuel. A recent computer simulation study was conducted to investigate differences in an airspace with and without the technology. A visual comparison of the trajectories in each airspace was done using heatmaps. Initial inspection showed the heatmaps were quite sensitive to small differences among trajectories. In this paper, we demonstrate the use and efficacy of kernel smoothing for improved visual comparisons of high density and overlapping aircraft trajectories via heatmaps.