AirTrafficSim

AirTrafficSim is a lightweight collection of tools for air traffic management research.

This branch (v0.2) contains the rewrite of the older v0.1¹ version.

It aims to be significantly more accessible, with absolutely minimal dependencies by default. Extra features (e.g. full web-based simulation environment) must be enabled manually with feature flags.

Features

• support for modern automatic differentiation (via JAX)
• support for the Array API: Numpy, JAX, PyTorch, CuPy arrays can be passed into functions
  • partial support for polars.Expr with plugin
• BADA3 ISA atmosphere model
• thermodynamic calculations

Installation

v0.2 is currently under heavy development and not considered stable. For the latest alpha version:

pip install airtrafficsim

For the latest bleeding-edge version:

pip install "https://github.com/HKUST-OCTAD-LAB/AirTrafficSim/archive/dev.zip"

Feature Flags

Using the command above will install a version with very minimal footprint. Depending on your use case, you can select one or more optional dependencies:

• all: install all optional dependencies
• polars: support for polars DataFrame (used in simulation and postprocessing third party data)
• networking: support for downloading data from external third party sources
• era5: support for parsing NetCDF for Google ARCO ERA5.
• jax: support for automatic differentiation
• plot: utils for nicer plotting

For example:

pip install "airtrafficsim[networking,polars]"

Development

git clone https://github.com/HKUST-OCTAD-LAB/AirTrafficSim -b dev --depth=1
cd AirTrafficSim
uv venv
uv sync --all-extras --all-groups

To run scripts:

uv run examples/autodiff.py

Alternatively, activate your virtualenv:

source .venv/bin/activate
python3 examples/autodiff.py

Documentation

uv run mkdocs serve

Then, navigate to http://127.0.0.1:8000/AirTrafficSim/.

Contributing

1. Follow Black style.
2. Prefer pure functions over deep inheritance hierarchies.
3. Use typed code whenever possible.

We use the following tools to check the style on each push:

• Ruff for linting,
• MyPy for type checking

Locally, run the following before committing:

chmod +x ./scripts/style-check.sh
./scripts/style-check.sh

Recommended VSCode extensions: charliermarsh.ruff, matangover.mypy, usernamehw.errorlens, ms-toolsai.jupyter

License

Unlike v0.1 (GPLv3), this branch is licensed under the more permissive MIT License.