Identification of ship trajectories when approaching and berthing in Sines port based on AIS data

Abstract

A data mining approach is adopted for identifying ship behavior in the approaches and inside the port area using the Automatic Identification System (AIS) data, covering different ship types, sizes and final terminals within the port. The approach consists of two steps: (1) clustering ship trajectories in the port area and identifying the characteristics of the clusters; (2) determining the waypoints along the ship routes by which ships approaching to the terminals based on the analysis of ship trajectories within the clusters. The clustering results present both the ship behavior patterns and the area where significant changes in the behavior patterns for ship path, which are the dominant behavior attributes for ships in ports. The proposed method is applied to the ship trajectories entering the Sines Port, and the results of this study demonstrate that AIS data can be used to provide a systematic understanding of ship behavior even inside a port area.