Domain Knowledge-informed Machine Learning Model to Study Weather-induced Flight Delays

Author

• Gurvir BawaFollow

Date of Award

Fall 2026

Access Type

Dissertation - Open Access

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

Department

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Committee Chair

Richard S. Stansbury

Committee Chair Email

[email protected]

Committee Co-Chair

Christopher G. Herbster

Committee Co-Chair Email

[email protected]

First Committee Member

Keith Garfield

First Committee Member Email

[email protected]

Second Committee Member

Yongxin Liu

Second Committee Member Email

[email protected]

Third Committee Member

Alejandro Vargas

Third Committee Member Email

[email protected]

College Dean

James W. Gregory

Abstract

Weather-induced Traffic Management Initiatives (TMIs) occur rarely relative to normal air traffic operations. This scarcity produces severe class imbalance that limits predictive models of flight delay. To address it, this dissertation leverages a physics- and domain- knowledge informed Variational Autoencoder (VAE), conditioned on airport identity, that generates physically plausible synthetic weather events for underrepresented TMI categories. The fidelity of the model is assessed with a calibrated discrepancy measure disclosed along- side the results rather than described in free-form terms. A multitask Graph Neural Network (GNN) is then trained on the augmented dataset to jointly classify airport-level TMI status and predict flight delays across a 39-airport network, achieving a strong, stable aggregate performance. Its remaining errors are shown to concentrate in specific, interpretable cir- cumstances rather than being distributed unpredictably across the dataset. Together, thee results show that physics-informed synthetic augmentation can improve multitask prediction of weather-driven disruption, while offering a precise , quantified account for where and why the approach still falls short.

Scholarly Commons Citation

Bawa, Gurvir, "Domain Knowledge-informed Machine Learning Model to Study Weather-induced Flight Delays" (2026). Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses. 1026.
https://commons.erau.edu/edt/1026