Tangram in Action: Practical Use Cases for Real-time Open Aviation Research
Xavier Olive (Université de Toulouse)
Yan Lok Cheung (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
Junzi Sun (TU Delft - Aerospace Engineering)
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Abstract
tangram is an open research framework for real-time processing of high-throughput geospatial surveillance streams, with a primary application in ADS-B and Mode S surveillance data. While large-scale historical datasets have motivated extensive aviation research, the transfer of methods and algorithms to live data streams remains less documented. This transfer is significantly more challenging: real-time analyses are difficult to implement, debug, and reproduce. tangram addresses this gap by providing a modular and extensible platform that lowers the technical barriers for researchers, enabling them to integrate their own algorithms without developing a full streaming infrastructure, so that they can focus on addressing their own research questions. This paper introduces the architecture of the platform and demonstrates its flexibility through four representative use cases in air traffic management: integrating weather forecasts, estimating fuel flow, analysing contrail formation, and monitoring airport performance. Together, these examples illustrate how tangram enables reproducible, real-time experimentation and opens new perspectives for operationally relevant research in aviation.
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