A new proposal for the prediction of an aircraft engine fuel consumption: a novel CNN-BiLSTM deep neural network model

The purpose of this study is to develop and test a new deep learning model to predict aircraft fuel consumption. For this purpose, real data obtained from different landings and take-offs were used. As a result, a new hybrid convolutional neural network (CNN)-bi-directional long short term memory (BiLSTM) model was developed as intended.

The data used are divided into training and testing according to the k-fold 5 value. In this study, 13 different parameters were used together as input parameters. Fuel consumption was used as the output parameter. Thus, the effect of many input parameters on fuel flow was modeled simultaneously using the deep learning method in this study. In addition, the developed hybrid model was compared with the existing deep learning models long short term memory (LSTM) and BiLSTM.

In this study, when tested with LSTM, one of the existing deep learning models, values of 0.9162, 6.476, and 5.76 were obtained for R², root mean square error (RMSE), and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), respectively. For the BiLSTM model when tested, values of 0.9471, 5.847 and 4.62 were obtained for R², RMSE and MAPE, respectively. In the proposed hybrid model when tested, values of 0.9743, 2.539 and 1.62 were obtained for R², RMSE and MAPE, respectively. The results obtained according to the LSTM and BiLSTM models are much closer to the actual fuel consumption values. The error of the models used was verified against the actual fuel flow reports, and an average absolute percent error value of less than 2% was obtained.

In this study, a new hybrid CNN-BiLSTM model is proposed. The proposed model is trained and tested with real flight data for fuel consumption estimation. As a result of the test, it is seen that it gives much better results than the LSTM and BiLSTM methods found in the literature. For this reason, it can be used in many different engine types and applications in different fields, especially the turboprop engine used in the study. Because it can be applied to different engines than the engine type used in the study, it can be easily integrated into many simulation models.