Context-Sensitive Prediction of Vessel Behavior

Matthias Steidel,Jan Mentjes,Axel Hahn

doi:10.3390/jmse8120987

Abstract

Research in the field of maritime anomaly detection and vessel behavior prediction primarily focuses on developing methods for extracting typical vessel movement patterns from historical traffic data. However, contextual information is currently not considered during pattern extraction by existing research. Combining contextual information with historical traffic data has the potential to produce both more accurate traffic patterns and more precise predictions of vessel behavior. This paper investigates the benefit of incorporating contextual information during the extraction of vessel behavior and the prediction of the most probable vessel behavior. A method is presented that combines historical vessel traffic data with information about the course of waterways. Typical behavior patterns are extracted by applying kernel density estimation, which are subsequently used for predicting the most probable vessel behavior. Using this approach, we were able to predict in which area the vessel is most likely to sail, as well as the actual track for a sailing time of 2:35 h. Additional potential applications of our approach can be derived from the results, which, in addition to behavior prediction, can also be used to detect anomalous vessel behavior.

Highlights

Surveilling the world’s oceans is a challenging task due to the fact that around 71 percent of the earth’s surface is covered by water
Research in the field of maritime anomaly detection and vessel behavior prediction primarily focuses on developing methods for extracting typical vessel movement patterns from historical traffic data
This paper investigates the benefit of incorporating contextual information during the extraction of vessel behavior and the prediction of the most probable vessel behavior

Summary

Introduction

Surveilling the world’s oceans is a challenging task due to the fact that around 71 percent of the earth’s surface is covered by water. In 2019, around 11 billion tons of goods were shipped with vessels on one of the seven seas, making the seas the most important way of transportation in today’s globalized world. This number is expected to increase in the few years until 2024 with an annual growth of maritime trade of 3.4 percent [1]. The early identification of potential ship-to-ship encounters is one of the most important goals of VTS officers. For their surveillance task, VTS officers can rely on data from different sources. As well as data from the Automatic Identification System (AIS) [2]

Results

Discussion

Conclusion