Identifying similar days for air traffic management

Air traffic managers face challenging decisions due to uncertainity in weather and air traffic. One way to support their decisions is to identify similar historical days, the traffic management actions taken on those days, and the resulting outcomes. We develop similarity measures based on quarter-hourly capacity and demand data at four case study airports — EWR, SFO, ORD and JFK. We find that dimensionality reduction is feasible for capacity data, and base similarity on principal components. Dimensionality reduction cannot be efficiently performed on demand data, consequently similarity is based on original data. We find that both capacity and demand data lack natural clusters and propose a continuous similarity measure. Finally, we estimate overall capacity and demand similarities, which are visualized using Metric Multidimensional Scaling plots. We observe that most days with air traffic management activity are similar to certain other days, validating the potential of this approach for decision support.