Recently, Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms have shown increased interest in various application domains including in Air Transportation Management (ATM). Different AI in particular Machine Learning (ML) algorithms are used to provide decision support in autonomous decision-making tasks in the ATM domain e.g. predicting air transportation traffic and optimizing traffic flows. However, most of the time these automated systems are not accepted or trusted by the intended users as the decisions provided by AI are often opaque, non-intuitive and not understandable by human operators. Safety is the major pillar to air traffic management, and no black box process can be inserted in a decision-making process when human life is involved.

In order to address this challenge related to transparency of the automated system in the ATM domain, ARTIMATION focuses on investigating AI methods in predicting air transportation traffic and optimizing traffic flows based on the domain of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). Here, AI models’ explainability in terms of understanding a decision i.e., post hoc interpretability and understanding how the model works i.e., transparency can be provided in air traffic management. In predicting air transportation traffic and optimizing traffic flows systems, ARTIMATION will provide a proof-of-concept of transparent AI models that includes visualization, explanation, generalization with adaptability over time to ensure safe and reliable decision support.