Accurate short-term demand forecasting is crucial to airline revenue management, yet most existing systems fail to meet this need because current models treat booking data as a single temporal dimension, either the accumulation of bookings for a specific flight or the historical booking profile of the same route. This unidimensional view discards information carried by the other temporal stream and forecasting absolute passenger counts introduces a further operational fragility when change in planned aircraft type alters total seat capacity. This study addresses both limitations. A dual-stream Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) integrated with attention framework is proposed that simultaneously processes two complementary input sequences: a horizontal sequence capturing intra-flight booking accumulation over the days preceding departure, and a vertical sequence capturing inter-flight booking patterns at fixed days-before-departure offsets across historical flights. Multiple dual-stream architectural variants, combining self-attention, cross-attention, and hybrid attention with concatenation, residual, and gated fusion strategies, are developed and evaluated. Experiments on real-world reservation data from the national airline of Bangladesh, Biman Bangladesh Airlines (BBA), demonstrate that the proposed hybrid model achieves a Mean Absolute Error of 2.8167 and a coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.9495, outperforming single-stream baselines, tree-based models, and three prior dual-LSTM architectures applied to the same data. Validation across four flight category pairs; domestic versus international, direct versus transit, high versus low frequency, and short versus mid versus long haul confirms that the model generalizes across operationally diverse route types. Biman Bangladesh Airlines (BBA) has officially integrated this methodology into its operations.
Flight delay prediction has become a key focus in air traffic management (ATM), as delays reflect inefficiencies in the system. This paper proposes LLM4Delay, a large language model (LLM)-based framework for predicting flight delays from the perspective of air traffic controllers monitoring aircraft after they enter the terminal maneuvering area (TMA). LLM4Delay is designed to integrate textual aeronautical information, including flight data, weather reports, and aerodrome notices, together with multiple trajectories that model airspace conditions, forming a comprehensive delay-relevant context. By jointly leveraging comprehensive textual and trajectory contexts via instance-level projection, an effective cross-modality adaptation strategy that maps multiple instance-level trajectory representations into the language modality, the framework improves delay prediction accuracy. LLM4Delay demonstrates superior performance compared to existing ATM frameworks and prior time-series-to-language adaptation methods. This highlights the complementary roles of textual and trajectory data while leveraging knowledge from both the pretrained trajectory encoder and the pretrained LLM. The proposed framework enables continuous updates to predictions as new information becomes available, indicating potential operational relevance.
Accurate passenger queue forecasting in airport terminals is essential for efficient departure operations, as it enables proactive congestion management. However, time-varying passenger demand and heterogeneous facility usage across multiple departure facilities make forecasting challenging. In this work, we propose a passenger queue forecasting framework that learns historical passenger flow patterns from operational data. The proposed model employs a Transformer-based architecture to capture temporal dependencies and inter-facility correlations using past queue length and waiting time at departure gates and security checkpoints, together with passenger throughput at check-in islands. The learned representations are mapped to two facility-specific prediction heads to predict queue length and waiting time at departure gates and security checkpoints. Experimental results demonstrate accurate forecasts up to two hours ahead. The proposed approach offers practical real-time decision support for proactive queue management and staff reallocation in airport terminal operations.
Short-term air traffic flow prediction in terminal airspace is essential for proactive air traffic management. Existing approaches predominantly model traffic flow as aggregated time series. However, traffic dynamics are governed by aircraft states and their interactions in continuous airspace. Such aggregation obscures fine-grained information, including aircraft kinematics, boundary interactions, and control intent. Here we present AeroSense, a state-to-flow modeling paradigm that predicts future traffic flow directly from instantaneous airspace situations represented as dynamic sets of aircraft states derived from ADS-B trajectories. By establishing an end-to-end mapping from microscopic aircraft states to future regional traffic flow, AeroSense preserves aircraft-level dynamics while naturally accommodating varying traffic density without relying on historical look-back windows. Experiments on a large-scale real-world dataset show that AeroSense exhibits admirable predictive accuracy and robustness over aggregation-based forecasting approaches, particularly during high-density traffic periods. These findings suggest that aircraft-state situation modeling provides a promising alternative to conventional time-series forecasting in air traffic flow management.