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Predicting destinations and arrival times of vessels could improve the efficiency of the naval transportation industry as well as the traffic safety. While the Automatic Identification System (AIS) messages contain a dedicated destination field, this one is more than often wrongly filled. However, as we show in this paper, it still contains relevant information should it be properly processed. We propose an approach to identify, quantify and fix the errors in the AIS destination field. A "cleaning-matching" algorithm matches the firstly cleaned raw AIS message with a standard list of port names, and returns the most likely destination(s) it is referring to. The uncertainty and imprecision of the algorithms’ output is represented by belief functions. The accuracy of the algorithm is evaluated using a sample of one month of AIS data labeled with the ground truth destination. We show that the proposed algorithm increases the accuracy of the predicted destination based on the AIS destination field by 20%.

Seaports play a vital role in the global economy, as they operate as the connection corridors to all other modes of transport and as engines of growth for the wider region. But ports today are faced with numerous unique challenges and for them to remain competitive, significant investments are required. In support of greater transparency in policy making, decisions regarding investment need to be supported by data-driven intelligence. It is often an overlooked fact that seaports do not remain static over time; such spatial units often evolve according to environmental patterns both in size but also connectivity and operational capacity. As such any valid decision making regarding port investment and policy making, essentially needs to take into account port evolution over time and space. In this work, we leverage the huge amounts of vessel data that are progressively becoming available through the Automatic Identification System (AIS) and distributed machine learning to define a seaport's extended area of operation. Specifically, we present our adaptation of the well-known KDE algorithm to the map-reduce paradigm, and report results on the port of Shanghai.

Seaports are spatial units that do not remain static over time. They are constantly in flux, evolving according to environmental and connectivity patterns both in size and operational capacity. As such any valid decision making regarding port investment and policy making, essentially needs to take into account port evolution over time and space, thus, accurately defining a seaport's exact location, operational boundaries, capacity, connectivity indicators, environmental impact and overall throughput. In this work, we apply a data driven approach to defining a seaport's extended area of operation based on data collected though the Automatic Identification System (AIS). Specifically, we present our adaptation of the well-known KDE algorithm to the MapReduce paradigm, and report results on the port of Rotterdam.

Computational Maritime Situational Awareness (MSA) supports the maritime industry, governments, and international organizations with machine learning and big data techniques for analyzing vessel traffic data available through the Automatic Identification System (AIS). A critical challenge of scaling computational MSA to big data regimes is integrating the core learning algorithms with big data storage modes and data models. To address this challenge, we report results from our experimentation with MongoDB, a NoSQL document-based database which we test as a supporting platform for computational MSA. We experiment with a document model that avoids database joins when linking position and voyage AIS vessel information and allows tuning the database index and document sizes in response to the AIS data rate. We report results for the AIS data ingested and analyzed daily at the NATO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE).

This paper addresses multi-sensor surveillance where some sensors provide intermittent, feature-rich information. Effective exploitation of this information in a multi-hypothesis tracking context requires computationally-intractable processing with deep hypothesis trees. This report introduces two approaches to address this problem, and compares these to single-stage, track-while-fuse processing. The first is a track-before-fuse approach that provides computational efficiency at the cost of reduced track continuity; the second is a track-break-fuse approach that is computationally efficient without sacrificing track continuity. Simulation and sea trial results are provided.