Compilation and exploitation of an open-source aviation dataset on traffic and CO2 emissions flows

Résumé

The study of the environmental transition of the aviation sector calls for prospective traffic scenarios.Detailed traffic and emissions inventories are often needed to refine the available analyses and to enablethe simulation of regionalised scenarios. In the past studies, these are generally based on commercial,proprietary traffic data, making their dissemination problematic and reducing the reproducibility of thescience produced. Open-source alternatives do exist, but with limited geographical coverage. This paperpresents a method to aggregate different sources of flight information, in order to obtain an open-sourceair traffic dataset for 2019. Then, missing flight information is identified and completed using an airlineroute database built from Wikipedia parsing and related socio-economic data. After that, several referencedatasets are used to evaluate the accuracy of the extended open-source dataset. Despite varying accuracyfor different routes, major traffic flows are reasonably well estimated at the country and continental levels.Finally, the CO2emissions are obtained using an existing aircraft performance surrogate model, and theaccuracies are examined compared to the results from previous studies.