Amelia: A Large Dataset and Benchmark for Airport Surface Movement Forecasting

Demand for air travel is rising, straining existing aviation infrastructure. In the US, more than 90% of airport control towers are understaffed, falling short of FAA and union standards. This, in part, has contributed to an uptick in near-misses and safety-critical events, highlighting the need for advancements in air traffic management technologies to ensure safe and efficient operations. Data-driven predictive models for terminal airspace show potential to address these challenges; however, the lack of large-scale surface movement datasets in the public domain has hindered the development of scalable and generalizable approaches. To address this, we introduce Amelia-42, a first-of-its-kind large collection of raw airport surface movement reports streamed through the FAA's System Wide Information Management (SWIM) Program, comprising over two years of trajectory data (~9.19 TB) across 42 US airports. We open-source tools to process this data into clean tabular position reports. We release Amelia42-Mini, a 15-day sample per airport, fully processed data on HuggingFace for ease of use. We also present a trajectory forecasting benchmark consisting of Amelia10-Bench, an accessible experiment family using 292 days from 10 airports, as well as Amelia-TF, a transformer-based baseline for multi-agent trajectory forecasting. All resources are available at our website: https://ameliacmu.github.io and https://huggingface.co/AmeliaCMU.