Our paper “Data Mining and Machine Learning Techniques supporting Time-based Separation Concept Deployment”, co-written with Eurocontrol and WaPT, has been accepted by the 37th Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC) in London, U.K. The paper presents two methods to allow air traffic controllers to deliver separation minima accurately and safely, on the basis of time intervals instead of distances. Importantly, in strong headwind conditions,  the aircraft’s groundspeed during approach decreases, meaning that keeping the distance-based separation method results in  lower landing rates. At a time of intensified air traffic, this situation leads to considerable delays at airports with significant costs to operators and travellers. With the new methods presented in the paper, capacity can increase by up to 14% in strong wind conditions, and by up to 8% in moderate wind conditions. The paper has been presented in September at DASC 2018. If you wish to go deeper into the subject, do not hesitate to contact our research department at research@euranova.eu. The abstract The Time-Based Separation (TBS) concept consists in the definition of separation minima for aircraft on the final approach to a runway based on time intervals instead of distances, as applied in Distance-Based Separation (DBS) operations. TBS allows for dynamic distance separation reductions in strong headwind conditions so as to preserve time spacing across all wind conditions. However, TBS application entails the use of a support tool providing separation distance indicators depending on the applicable time separation minimum, the aircraft speed profile which also depends on the headwind conditions. This paper details two methodologies allowing a system to compute those TBS indicators so as to allow Air Traffic Controllers to accurately and safely deliver the TBS minima using a separation delivery support tool. The first approach is based on “analytical” data mining and modelling whereas the second one is

Our paper “Graph BI & Analytics: Current State and Future Challenges” has been accepted for publication at the 20th International Conference on Big Data Analytics and Knowledge Discovery, taking place in Regensburg, Germany. The paper presents the state of the art of graph BI & analytics, with a focus on graph warehousing. We survey the topics of graph modelling, management, querying, and processing in graph warehouses. Then we conclude by discussing future research directions for solving complex graph problems, building native graph components and intelligent techniques to assist end-users in building and analysing the graph. More importantly, the paper calls for the development of intelligent, efficient and industry-grade graph data warehousing systems to support the structure-driven management and analytics of data efficiently. While adopting a template that is similar to the traditional BI systems, the graph BI that is presented here extends current systems with graph analytics capabilities that deliver graph-derived insights. The paper has been presented in September at DaWak 2018, you can now find the full version here. If you wish to go deeper into the subject, don’t hesitate to contact our research department at research@euranova.eu. Abstract. In an increasingly competitive market, making well-informed decisions requires the analysis of a wide range of heterogeneous, large and complex data. This paper focuses on the emerging field of graph warehousing. Graphs are widespread structures that yield a great expressive power. They are used for modeling highly complex and interconnected domains, and efficiently solving emerging big data application. This paper presents the current status and open challenges of graph BI and analytics, and motivates the need for new warehousing frameworks aware of the topological nature of graphs. We survey the topics of graph modeling, management, processing and analysis in graph warehouses. Then we conclude by discussing future research directions and positioning

Due to the increasing importance and volume of highly interconnected data, such as in social or information networks, a plethora of graph mining techniques have been designed to enable the analysis of such data. In this work, we focus on the mining of associations between entity features in networks. We model each entity feature as a dimension to be analyzed. Consequently we build our approach on top of the existing graph cube framework which is an extension of the concept of the data cube to networks. Our task is particularly challenging because it requires the analysis of both the initial multidimensional network and all its subsequent aggregate forms. As soon as we deal with a big data situation it is impossible for an analyst to consider manually all the possible views of the network data. The aim of this work is to design an algorithm for the discovery of interesting patterns in large graph cubes. Thus, instead of examining all the possible aggregations manually, the proposed technique leads the analyst to the interesting associations or patterns in the multidimensional network. Furthermore, we study the application of existing algorithms from the frequent itemset mining literature on graph data and propose a mapping between the two settings. Florian Demesmaeker, Amine Ghrab, Siegfried Nijssen, Sabri Skhiri: Discovering interesting patterns in large graph cubes. 2017 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data), Boston, MA, USA, 2017, pp. 3322-3331. Click here to access the paper.