A distributed framework for extracting maritime traffic patterns

Abstract

All the modern surveillance systems take advantage of the Automatic Identification System (AIS), a compulsory tracking system for many types of vessels. Ships that carry AIS transponders on board transmit their position and status in order to alert nearby vessels and ground stations, but this information can well be used to identify events of interest and support decision making. The detection of anomalies (i.e. unexpected sailing behavior) in vessels’ trajectories is such an event, which is of utmost importance. Approaches for detecting such anomalies vary from extracting normality models to searching for individual cases, such as AIS switch-off or collision avoidance maneuvers. The current research work follows the former method; it employs sparse historic AIS data and polynomial interpolation in order to extract shipping lanes. It modifies the DB-Scan clustering algorithm in order to achieve more coherent trajectory clusters, which are then composed to create the shipping lanes. The proposed approach implements distributed processing on Apache Spark in order to improve processing speed and scalability and is evaluated using real-world AIS data collected from terrestrial AIS receivers. The evaluation shows that the biggest part (i.e. more than 90%) of any future vessel trajectory falls within the extracted shipping lanes.

This work was supported by the MASTER and SmartShip Projects through the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie-Slodowska Curie grant agreement no 777695 and 823916 respectively. The work reflects only the authors’ view and that the EU Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.