Physics-Aware and Intention-Enhanced Trajectory Prediction for Non-Towered Terminal Airspace

To address the challenges in multi-modal trajectory prediction for multi-aircraft interactions within non-towered terminal airspace, including the insufficient extraction of long-range temporal dependencies, neglect of physical separation constraints, and barriers to integrating flight intentions and multi-source environmental context, this paper develops a trajectory prediction model integrated with long-range temporal modeling, physics-aware spatial interaction, and intention context enhancement. A parameter-shared ST-Transformer temporal encoder is established to capture long-term motion patterns of aircraft via global multi-head self-attention, and temporal attention pooling is adopted to mitigate error accumulation in long-term prediction. A physical distance-aware ST-GAT module is designed, which embeds the spatial distance prior between aircraft into the attention calculation and leverages distance masks to reduce interference from distant irrelevant aircraft. Furthermore, an intention-aware context enhancement module (IACEM) is proposed. It identifies the distribution of flight phases and adaptively incorporates meteorological information to construct enhanced features embedded with high-level semantics and environmental priors. Finally, a CVAE-based framework is utilized to generate multiple candidate trajectories satisfying kinematic constraints. Multiple verification experiments are carried out on the TrajAir dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms various baseline models in terms of ADE and FDE. Ablation studies and visual analysis verify that the three core modules produce synergistic improvements. The model achieves higher prediction accuracy under scenarios involving 2D complex maneuvers, 3D climbing turns, and dense multi-aircraft interactions, which proves the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed algorithm for trajectory prediction in non-towered terminal airspace.