A large-scale data set of aircraft interaction networks

Abstract

Complex network concepts have become the foundation of many real-world studies, encompassing topics like the dynamics of spreading processes or the evaluation of the resilience of complex systems. One of their major enablers is the availability of real data sets, on which to test and validate models and algorithms. We here present a data set containing 1,708 network representations of daily interactions between aircraft over a vast area of the European airspace, for 854 days spanning between 2015 and 2021. It has been obtained by processing trajectories, both planned and executed, and comparing aircraft positions in a pairwise fashion. This is further complemented by metadata about the status of the airspace, in a multi-scale structure. This database may act as the data source of any study willing to use these interactions to develop new tools for understanding air traffic dynamics; and more generally, to test complex networks algorithms and models on large-scale real graphs.