Automatic Maritime Traffic Synthetic Route: A Framework for Route Prediction

Abstract

Ship movement information is becoming increasingly available, resulting in an overwhelming increase of data transmitted to human operators. Understanding the Maritime traffic patterns is important to Maritime Situational Awareness (MSA) applications in particular, to classify and predict trajectories on sea. Therefore, there is need for automatic processing to synthesize the behavior of interest in a simplified, clear, and effective way without any loss of data originality. In this paper, we propose a method to calculate route prediction from a synthetic route representation data once the picture of the maritime traffic is constructed. The synthetic route knowledge based on Automatic Identification System (AIS) is used to classify and predict future routes along which a vessel is going to move. This is in agreement with the partially observed track and given the vessel static and dynamic information. The prediction results do not only reduce data storage space in the database but can also supply data support for traffic management, accident detection, and avoidance of automatic collision and therefore promote the development of maritime intelligent traffic systems. Finally, the simulation results shows a good tradeoff between the predicted and the actual observed vessel routes.