AirTrafficSim is a web-based air traffic simulation software written in Python and javascript. It is designed to visualize historical and simulated flight data and perform microscopic studies of air traffic movement with the integration of a historical weather database. It aims to assist users to evaluate the performance of ATM algorithms.

Features

• Replay historical flights with user-provided data (e.g. from FlightRadar 24)
• Air traffic simulation using BADA 3.15 performance data and OpenAP
• Navigation data simulation and visualization from x-plane 11
• Autopilot and Flight Management System simulation
• ATC commands (e.g. holding, vectoring, and direct to) simulation
• Simulation and visualisation with weather data from ECMWF ERA5 and custom radar image (HKO 256km radar images)
• Aircraft is controlled with an API interface to simulate ATC interaction

Credits

If you find AirTrafficSim useful for your research, please cite the following:

@article{Hui2023,
  title = {AirTrafficSim: An open-source web-based air traffic simulation platform.}, 
  author = {Ka Yiu Hui and Chris Hc. Nguyen and Go Nam Lui and Rhea P. Liem}, 
  journal = {Journal of Open Source Software},
  publisher = {The Open Journal}, 
  year = {2023}, 
  volume = {8}, 
  number = {86}, 
  pages = {4916},
  doi = {10.21105/joss.04916}, 
  url = {https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.04916}
}

Installation

Linux or WSL on window is recommended for AirTrafficSim. The latest stable release of AirTrafficSim can be installed from conda-forge. All dependencies will be installed automatically with the web client pre-built and ready for use directly after installation.

It is recommended to install AirTrafficSim in a new conda environment:

conda create -n airtrafficsim -c conda-forge airtrafficsim 

Then, please initialise AirTrafficSim by specifying a folder path to create a symbolic link to the airtrafficsim_data folder:

conda activate airtrafficsim
airtrafficsim --init <path to a folder>

This will alow you to provide or retrieve any data and create simulation environments to AirTrafficSim through this folder alias. Please visit the documentation for more information.

After installation, please also download, unzip, and store BADA 3.15 data files in airtrafficsim_data/performance/BADA. In addition, follow this guide to set up the API key for the weather database from ECMWF Climate Data Store.

Running AirTrafficSim

You can run AirTrafficSim by executing the following commands. Please be reminded to activate the conda environment when you use AirTrafficSim.

conda activate airtrafficsim
airtrafficsim

AirTrafficSim uses port 6111 for communication. Please open or forward the port accordingly if needed. You should be able to open the UI using any modern browser at http://localhost:6111. You may also check the console for any messages when using AirTrafficSim.

You can also run AirTrafficSim without the UI by providing the name of the simulation environment which is listed in environment. The environment name should be identical to the file name.

conda activate airtrafficsim
airtrafficsim --headless <environment name>

Documentation

The detailed documentation for AirTrafficSim is available at https://hkust-octad-lab.github.io/AirTrafficSim/, which includes tutorials on UI navigation and project structure as well as running different simulation environment.

Contribution

AirTrafficSim is under active development. We welcome everyone interested to contribute to the project and make AirTrafficSim more feature-rich. Please feel free to visit the detailed contribution guide in this repository or the documentation.