PRC Data Challenge

The Performance Review Commission (PRC) Data Challenge aims at engaging with data scientists, even without Aviation background, to create teams and compete to build an open Machine Learning (ML) model able to accurately infer the Actual TakeOff Weight (ATOW) of a flown flight.

PRC Data Challenge

The Data

We provide information for 369013 flights flown all over Europe in 2022. Flight data include origin/destination airport, aircraft type, off-block and arrival times,…and estimated TakeOff Weight (TOW). Thanks to the collaboration with OpenSky Network (OSN) we added the relevant trajectories at (max) 1 second granularity, accounting for around 158 GiB of parquet files.

The 105959 flights of the submission_set.csv will be used to rank the intermediate submissions before the deadline, and an additional 52190 will be used for the final prize ranking.

See the Data page for more details.

Attention

Updated challenge_set.csv on 16th Aug 2024

challenge_set.csv now contains fixes for tow originally below minimum mass for the relevant aircraft types.

Refreshed submission_set.csv on 8th Aug 2024

submission_set.csv now contains all columns and not just flight_id and tow.

Please consider re-downloading.

The Prize

A total prize of \(5000\) EUR will be distributed among the finalists’ teams.
Each finalist will receive a prize to acknowledge their innovative ideas and contributions towards solving the posed challenge problem.

Winners’ announcements will take place at the 12th edition of OpenSky Symposium in Hamburg on 7th–8th November 2024.

The submission deadline is (intermediary submissions are possible and welcome):
2024-10-28T00:00:00Z.

The why of Why

We got many questions about this challenge. We grouped and answered them as follows:

  • Why is the challenge focusing on ATOW?
    ATOW is an important input for models estimating fuel burnt and derived gaseous emissions.
    The current lack of openly available ATOW is typically compensated by assuming it to be equal to a certain percentage of the Maximum TakeOff Weight (MTOW) for the relevant aircraft model.
    With this challenge we aim at making available a better way to estimate ATOW, i.e. an Estimated TakeOff Weight (ETOW).

  • Why an Open model?
    The PRC (and many other Organizations, industrial actors and academia by the way) is interested in studies assessing the impact of Aviation to Climate Change. To this extent the availability of an open model allows for reproducibility, transparency of the results presented and in the end to trust in the performed analyses.

  • Why via a Data Challenge?
    The PRC thinks that there is a great pool of Data Scientists (much bigger than that of Aviation Experts!) that could help defining the open model of the Challenge.
    The Challenge also makes it possible to have a white box approach to the way the model is being defined which goes in the direction of transparency. This transparency is a way to build trust, reproducibility and eventually evolve a collaboration to improve the understanding (and the reduction) of the impact of Aviation to the environment.

Eligibility for Participation

Any data science and/or aviation enthusiast team or individual can participate to the challenge.

Please send an email for the team creation with the following info (this will be publicly visible [apart from emails] in a dedicated teams’ page):

  1. an OSN account (create one if you do not have it yet)
  2. corresponding member: name + email address
  3. list of members: team member name (eventual affiliation) + email address (optional)
  4. who you are: a description of the team
  5. rationale for participation

to

challenge AT opensky-network.org

A little while later, you will receive the team name and the relevant access/secret keys to obtain the Data via your OSN account; something like:

{
  "team_name": "team_warm_donkey",
  "team_id": "b8e3a438-d2f2-4a11-bf28-e7a8f84cf3db",
  "bucket_access_key": "blah",
  "bucket_access_secret": "blahblah"
}
Note

Anyone affiliated with OpenSky Network or EUROCONTROL is not eligible to participate to the PRC Data Challenge.

Acknowledgements

We would like to praise the following organisations, companies and individuals for their participation and support in the provision of advise, data and infrastructure for the challenge:

  • Airlines:
    • Austrian Airlines
    • Swiss
    • Vueling
  • OpenSky Network: Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast (ADS-B) trajectories, hosting of the challenge infrastructure. (John Fitzgerald, Allan Tart, Martin Strohmeier, Vincent Lenders)
  • Prof Junzi Sun (TU Delft): for wisely pre-processing, enhancing (meteorological data via fastmeteo), locally storing OSN trajectories and then making them available for the challenge
  • Dr Xavier Olive (ONERA): for advise and the invaluable traffic library
  • EUROCONTROL: for providing the relevant flight list (via Network Manager) and estimating TOW (Aviation Intelligence Unit).
  • José Miguel de PABLO GUERRERO (PRC Commissioner): for supporting and pushing for this initiative.

List of Acronyms

ADS-B: Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast

ATOW: Actual TakeOff Weight

ETOW: Estimated TakeOff Weight

ML: Machine Learning

MTOW: Maximum TakeOff Weight

OSN: OpenSky Network

PRC: Performance Review Commission

TOW: TakeOff Weight