On-the-fly Mobility Event Detection over Aircraft Trajectories

We present an application framework that consumes streaming positions from a large fleet of flying aircrafts monitored in real time over a wide geographical area. Tailored for aviation surveillance, this online processing scheme only retains locations conveying salient mobility events along each flight, and annotates them as stop, change of speed, heading or altitude, etc. Such evolving trajectory synopses must keep in pace with the incoming raw streams so as to get incrementally annotated with minimal loss in accuracy. We also develop one-pass heuristics to eliminate inherent noise and provide reliable trajectory representations. Our prototype implementation on top of Apache Flink and Kafka has been tested against various real and synthetic datasets offering concrete evidence of its timeliness, scalability, and compression efficiency, with tolerable concessions to the quality of resulting trajectory approximations.