Geometry-Informed Adaptive Time-Series Fusion of ADS-B Sensor Data for Short-Term Aircraft Trajectory Prediction

Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) systems provide continuous aircraft position reports for aviation surveillance and short-term trajectory prediction. However, many data-driven predictors directly model the longitude, latitude, and altitude contained in ADS-B messages as generic multivariate time-series variables, which can weaken latitude-dependent displacement, bearing, and local motion relationships during multi-step forecasting. This paper proposes Geometry-Informed Adaptive Time-Series Fusion (GeoATF), a forecasting framework for short-term aircraft trajectory prediction from ADS-B position reports. For multi-route learning, each input window is mapped from global absolute coordinates to a local geodesic chart anchored at the last observation. The predicted local offsets are subsequently decoded into World Geodetic System 1984 (WGS-84) coordinates through great-circle forward navigation. GeoATF combines a patch-based time-series Transformer (PatchTST) temporal branch for modeling historical ADS-B position sequences with a geometric–kinematic branch that constructs great-circle distance, bearing, velocity component, and trajectory change rate features from the same sequence. An adaptive branch weight fusion module then learns horizon-dependent geometric–kinematic branch weights for residual correction. Experiments on 945 ADS-B flights from ten routes demonstrate that GeoATF delivers more accurate multi-horizon trajectory forecasts than the evaluated baselines, with more pronounced advantages at longer forecast horizons. Flight-level statistical analysis supports the robustness of these improvements, while resource evaluation indicates a moderate computational footprint under the common inference protocol. These results suggest that explicitly representing geometric–kinematic information and adaptively fusing it with temporal features can improve short-term aircraft trajectory prediction using only historical ADS-B position data.