Danish Maritime Research Articles

AIS-based kinematic anomaly classification for maritime surveillance

Anomaly detection is crucial for maritime surveillance and law enforcement. Early identification of abnormal behavior ensures maritime order and fosters a safer environment for maritime traffic. However, anomaly identification and classification methods often suffer from vagueness because of the complexity of anomalies, limiting their effectiveness. We propose a systematic and data-driven framework for kinematic anomaly classification and detection. Through extensive inspection and experiments, a comprehensive characterization of diverse anomalies is provided to classify vessel kinematic anomalies into three categories, including Speed and Course Anomaly (SCA), Turning Anomaly (TA) and Loitering Anomaly (LA), along with detection methods that are tailored to each anomaly type to facilitate the production of high-quality anomaly labels. Subsequently, supervised training is exploited for anomaly classification. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated using the open Automatic Identification System (AIS) dataset provided by the Danish Maritime Authority (DMA). With proper feature design, the proposed method can achieve a classification accuracy of approximately 99% using simple neural networks.

Fingolimod—(no) injunction before patent grant

Abstract This article analyses the position of European courts on the availability of preliminary injunctions on the basis of a patent application, reviewing several national decisions in the fingolimod litigation. The decisions handed down by the Düsseldorf Regional Court, the Tribunal Judiciaire de Paris, the Danish Maritime and Commercial Court, the District Court of The Hague and the Barcelona Commercial Court show that the courts, with limited exceptions, reject provisional legal protection on the basis of a mere patent application on the grounds of absence of legal certainty. The analysis identifies four (minimum) prerequisites that must be fulfilled for the courts to consider the possibility of issuing an injunction before a patent is granted.

Maritime heritage and modern national identities in Scandinavia, circa 1900–2020

The Scandinavian nations are maritime nations but this does not mean that ‘maritime’ is a natural and conscious component of modern national identities in Scandinavia. National identities are shaped by diverse historical narratives and experiences, and they fluctuate in time and space. The contributions to this forum attempt to answer the question of to what extent modern national identities in Scandinavia incorporate such a maritime component. They study this question from the perspectives of Swedish naval officers and popular music culture, Danish maritime heritage culture and maritime labour, and Finland's naval diplomacy.

Shipping legitimacy and identity: The Danish Maritime Museum, 1915 and 2013

In this article, the author describes how the creation of the Danish maritime museums in 1915 and 2013 – both generously funded by maritime foundations and actors – was perceived by the shipping industry as initiatives that would help market the industry in the eyes of the public. He argues more generally that national maritime museums constitute focal points for disseminating narratives that legitimate maritime activities and establish these activities as symbols of national identities. It is suggested that maritime historians, curators and scholars reflect on the relationship between maritime industry actors and museum exhibition narratives, and consider the interests and capital that potentially underpin museums’ and curators’ decisions.

Robust Learning with Noisy Ship Trajectories by Adaptive Noise Rate Estimation.

Ship trajectory classification is of great significance for shipping analysis and marine security governance. However, in order to cover up their illegal fishing or espionage activities, some illicit ships will forge the ship type information in the Automatic Identification System (AIS), and this label noise will significantly impact the algorithm's classification accuracy. Sample selection is a common and effective approach in the field of learning from noisy labels. However, most of the existing methods based on sample selection need to determine the noise rate of the data through prior means. To address these issues, we propose a noise rate adaptive learning mechanism that operates without prior conditions. This mechanism is integrated with the robust training paradigm JoCoR (joint training with co-regularization), giving rise to a noise rate adaptive learning robust training paradigm called A-JoCoR. Experimental results on real-world trajectories provided by the Danish Maritime Authority verified the effectiveness of A-JoCoR. It not only realizes the adaptive learning of the data noise rate during the training process, but also significantly improves the classification performance compared with the original method.

Long-Term Trajectory Prediction for Oil Tankers via Grid-Based Clustering

Vessel trajectory prediction is an important step in route planning, which could help improve the efficiency of maritime transportation. In this article, a high-accuracy long-term trajectory prediction algorithm is proposed for oil tankers. The proposed algorithm extracts a set of waymark points that are representative of the key traveling patterns in an area of interest by applying DBSCAN clustering to historical AIS data. A novel path-finding algorithm is then developed to sequentially identify a subset of waymark points, from which the predicted trajectory to a fixed destination is produced. The proposed algorithm is tested using real data offered by the Danish Maritime Authority. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art vessel trajectory prediction algorithms and is able to make high-accuracy long-term trajectory predictions.

Trajectory clustering for SVR-based Time of Arrival estimation

Accurate vessel Time of Arrival (ToA) estimation is important for port operation and resource management. In this paper, we propose a data-driven approach for estimating the ToA of ships based on Automatic Identification System (AIS) data. The proposed approach exploits a novel trajectory clustering approach to extract representative routes, from which training trajectories are grouped into clusters and ToA estimation models based on Support Vector Regressor (SVR) are trained for each cluster. The proposed ToA estimation approach adopts a short period of the latest AIS data as input and performs SVR model selection and ToA estimation in real-time. A historical AIS dataset provided by the Danish Maritime Authority is used to evaluate the proposed approach. Numerical results for tanker ships travelling to the port of Skagen demonstrate that the proposed approach can achieve ToA estimations that are 40% to 70% more accurate than state-of-the-art ToA estimation methods.

Imagined futures of sail and steam – The role of community in envisioning entrepreneurial ventures

Entrepreneurship is often understood as an individualistic endeavour. This article investigates how cultural communities shape entrepreneurial activity through the process of envisioning competing imagined futures. By deploying a microhistorical approach, it explores a public debate about the transition from sail to steam in a late nineteenth-century Danish maritime community. In the debate, local actors evaluated and negotiated future entrepreneurial actions as embedded in existing norms, interpretations of the past, and socio-technical systems rather than independent, non-conformist ventures. The article demonstrates the potential role of community when we attempt to understand better how entrepreneurs construct and dispute over imagined futures.

My plate, not thine—copyright infringement of Würtz utensils

Abstract Danish Maritime and Commercial Court (Sø-og Handelsret), K.H. Würtz v/Kasper Heie Würtz v. F&H and Christain Bitz, Case number BS 1370/2016-SHR, 25 March 2020; and Court of Appeal of Eastern Denmark (Østre Landsret) F&H and Christain Bitz v.K.H. Würtz v/Kasper Heie Würtz Case Number BS - 1594/2020-OLR, 27 May 2021 The Danish Maritime Court and the High Court clarified the meaning of Article 2 of the Danish Copyright Act concerning exculsive rights of authors.

Deep Learning Methods for Vessel Trajectory Prediction Based on Recurrent Neural Networks

Data-driven methods open up unprecedented possibilities for maritime surveillance using Automatic Identification System (AIS) data. In this work, we explore deep learning strategies using historical AIS observations to address the problem of predicting future vessel trajectories with a prediction horizon of several hours. We propose novel sequence-to-sequence vessel trajectory prediction models based on encoder-decoder recurrent neural networks (RNNs) that are trained on historical trajectory data to predict future trajectory samples given previous observations. The proposed architecture combines Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) RNNs for sequence modeling to encode the observed data and generate future predictions with different intermediate aggregation layers to capture space-time dependencies in sequential data. Experimental results on vessel trajectories from an AIS dataset made freely available by the Danish Maritime Authority show the effectiveness of deep-learning methods for trajectory prediction based on sequence-to-sequence neural networks, which achieve better performance than baseline approaches based on linear regression or on the Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) architecture. The comparative evaluation of results shows: i) the superiority of attention pooling over static pooling for the specific application, and ii) the remarkable performance improvement that can be obtained with labeled trajectories, i.e., when predictions are conditioned on a low-level context representation encoded from the sequence of past observations, as well as on additional inputs (e.g., port of departure or arrival) about the vessel's high-level intention, which may be available from AIS.

Excessive Pharmaceutical Pricing as an Abuse of Dominant Position – The Case of CD Pharma (Denmark)

Abstract On 31 January 2018, the Danish Competition and Consumer Authority adopted a decision1 finding the Swedish company generic distributor CD Pharma in breach of Art. 102(a) Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) by abusing its dominant position and having imposed excessive and unfair prices for the drug Syntocinon. The company increased the price of the drug by 2000% in the period April-October 2014 in the Danish pharmaceutical market. CD Pharma appealed to the Danish Competition Appeals Board,2 which on 29 November 2018 upheld the decision by the Authority. On subsequent appeal to the Danish Maritime and Commercial Court,3 the judgment by the previous court was upheld in a 3-2 decision on 2 March 2020, thus finding CD Pharma liable for infringement of Danish competition law as well as Art. 102(a) TFEU. The decision is final and not subject to further appeal. The case raises outstanding legal-economic issues regarding excessive pricing such as relevant market definition in pharmaceutical cases, the length of abuse, competitive price benchmarks, definition of economic value and the matter of dominance in public procurement and tenders. The case is rather unusual in that the alleged abusive period amounted to a six-month period, CD Pharma was the ‘losing’ party in the bidding process for the supply of the medicine in question, and CD Pharma subsequently had reduced prices through negotiations with the Danish central medicine procurer, Amgros. Similar to the Aspen Pharma decision4 by the Italian Competition Authority, where the Italian Medicine Agency (AIFA) reported the case to the Competition Authority, it was the Danish medicine procurer Amgros who had notified the Danish Competition and Consumer Authority about allegedly abusive practices. This subsequently led to an investigation and the adoption of the Decision. Following an introduction describing the Danish pharmaceutical market and specifics of the case, section two of this contribution details the proceedings at Danish Competition Authority. Section three depicts the proceedings at Competition Appeals Tribunal, and section four deals with the proceedings at the Maritime and Commercial Court. Section five concludes.

MARITIME BIG DATA ANALYSIS WITH ARLAS

Abstract. The maritime industry has become a major part of globalization. Political and economic actors are meeting challenges regarding shipping and people transport. The Automatic Identification System (AIS) records and broadcasts the location of numerous vessels and delivers a huge amount of information that can be used to analyze fluxes and behaviors. However, the exploitation of these numerous messages requires tools based on Big Data principles.Acknowledgement of origin, destination, travel duration and distance of each vessel can help transporters to manage their fleet and ports to analyze fluxes and focus their investigations on some containers based on their previous locations. Thanks to the historical AIS messages provided by the Danish Maritime Authority and ARLAS PROC/ML, an open source and scalable processing platform based on Apache SPARK, we are able to apply our pipeline of processes and extract this information from millions of AIS messages. We use a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) to identify when a vessel is still or moving and we create “courses”, embodying the travel of the vessel. Then we derive the travel indicators. The visualization of results is made possible by ARLAS Exploration, an open source and scalable tool to explore geolocated data. This carto-centered application allows users to navigate into the huge amount of enriched data and helps to take benefits of these new origin and destination indicators. This tool can also be used to help in the creation of Machine Learning algorithms in order to deal with many maritime transportation challenges.

A traditional sport: Smuggling among South Funen sailors, 1950-1990

Using vessels and sailors from the South Funen Archipelago as a case study, this article examines the relationship between smuggling and sailors in Danish maritime culture between 1950 and 1990. Throughout the period, small-scale smuggling was considered a legitimate activity for sailors if done according to certain rules. Smuggling was largely portrayed as a sport grounded in tradition, not as an oppositional political act, but rather politically implicit. Central to the article is the argument that smuggling is not just an economic phenomenon conditioned by the interplay of supply and demand, but a cultural phenomenon related to state power, maritime culture and the onboard community.

Associations of age, occupation and nationality of seafarers with risk of evacuations at sea: A register-based study on Danish-flagged merchant ships

Although prevention of incidents leading to evacuations at sea is of vital importance, little is known about its causal patterns and demographic determinants. We investigated therefore relationships between age, occupation and nationality and causes of evacuations. The data were obtained from the Telemedical Assistance Service (TMAS) in Denmark between 2004 and 2014 supplemented with data on all seafarers from the Danish Maritime Authority (N = 73,344). These data included information on broad age groups, occupational position and nationality. The outcomes were evacuations from any cause and in four broad categories of causes leading to evacuations. A total of 403 evacuations were reported in the 11-year study period. 27% of the evacuations were due to external causes, 19% due to diseases of the circulatory system, 14% due diseases of the digestive system and 40% from other or undetermined causes. Age-adjusted all-cause evacuation rates varied between 1.4 and 3.4 incidents per 1000 person-years in 2004–2014 for officers and between 3.3 and 20.2 incidents for non-officers. An elevated risk of evacuations was found among both officers and non-officers aged ≥50 years, compared with those aged 30–49 years with odds ratios of 2.73 (95% confidence intervals 1.66, 4.50) and 2.59 (2.03, 3.31), respectively. The odds ratios for non-officers from non-Danish European Union and from non-European Union countries compared with Danish non-officers were 1.51 (1.12, 2.04) and 0.55 (0.42, 0.71), respectively. In conclusion, working as non-officer, older age and non-Danish EU nationality were associated with a higher risk of evacuations irrespective of the cause leading to evacuation.

Age and nationality in relation to injuries at sea among officers and non-officers: a study based on contacts from ships to Telemedical Assistance Service in Denmark

ObjectivesCharacterisation of worker injuries on board merchant ships is modest. Using telemedical service contacts in Denmark, we describe the worker injuries patterns and factors related to injury incidence.MethodsThe data for...

Pathways to climate-neutral shipping: A Danish case study

In this paper, we describe pathways for the Danish maritime cargo sector to achiev CO2e (equivalent) neutrality by 2050 in compliance with the Paris Agreement. In the approach of our model, we not only include national greenhouse gas emissions, but also suggest a method for assigning greenhouse gas emissions from international shipping to countries. Our modelling results indicate either that strong regulatory carbon budgets or a carbon price of at most 350–450 €2016/t CO2e would be necessary to induce this urgently needed transition. This would double today's average cargo transport costs, while increasing average import values by only 6–8%. Regarding fuel technologies, hydrogen, methanol and ammonia are the most suitable from a socio-economic cost perspective, though, due to the high cost uncertainties, there is no clear winner. Liquefied natural gas as an alternative intermediate solution would only have a short window of opportunity, due to methane leakage causing high greenhouse gas emissions as well as high fuel and technology costs. In so far as this gaseous fuel is based on renewable sources it can play a role, but only if methane leakage is drastically reduced. At present battery storage is only an option for short ranges.

“After Thunder Comes Rain”: The ECJ Finally Rules on the Boundaries of the EUMR Standstill Obligation

In its judgment of 31 May 2018, case C-633/16, the European Court of Justice ruled on the preliminary questions referred by the Danish Maritime and Commercial Court in the context of a merger notified to the Danish Competition and Consumer Authority by KPMG DK and EY DK. The referring court asked the ECJ to clarify on the scope of the so-called standstill obligation imposed on the parties of a notifiable transaction by article 7 of the Council Regulation (EC) No. 139/2004 (EUMR). The decision was long awaited, since after having imposed several fines for gun jumping practices in recent times, it is the first case ever in which the Court has been asked to take position on the matter through a preliminary ruling. As for substance, the European Court of Justice stated that article 7, paragraph 1 of the EUMR must be interpreted as meaning that a concentration is implemented only by a transaction which contributes to the change in control of the target undertaking. In doing so, the Court gives a broad overview of the EU merger control system, recalling the fundamental concepts of concentration, control and standstill in order to give a systematic interpretation of the provisions at stake.

Danish Court: Consortium Agreement and Joint Bidding Permissible under Competition Law

The legality of consortium agreements and joint bidding for public contracts under competition law has been a widely debated subject over the past couple of years. On 27 August 2018, the Danish Maritime and Commercial High Court rendered a much anticipated judgment on this subject. The judgment is now under appeal to the Danish Supreme Court. In its judgment, the Court repealed the Danish competition authorities’ decisions in a case regarding a consortium agreement between two companies relating to their joint bid on a public tender for road marking works in Denmark. According to the competition authorities’ decisions, the consortium agreement and the joint bid was a by object infringement of competition law. However, the Danish Maritime and Commercial High Court disagreed and held that the agreement did not infringe competition law. This article sets out the background to the proceedings, summarises the key findings of the court and comments on the legality of consortium agreements and joint bidding for public contracts under competition law.

A Ten-Step Decision Path to Determine When to Use Blockchain Technologies

Many organizations are looking at blockchain technologies. However, the drawbacks of blockchain databases (e.g., scalability, capacity, latency, privacy) mean that the technology is not always appropriate. This article presents a ten-step decision path that can help determine whether the application of blockchain is justified and, if so, which kind of blockchain technology to use. We describe how this decision path was used to develop a blockchain prototype for the Danish maritime shipping industry.

Perceived Training Needs of Maritime Doctors and General Practitioners

Introduction: Medical practitioners provide pre-employment examinations and periodic health examinations to seafarers, fishermen, offshore employees, and maritime students to ensure that they are fit for work. So far, very little is known about doctors’ perceptions of their professional training needs and expectations. The objective of this study was to gain insight on (a) the breadth of services offered, (b) follow-up practices, and (c) perceived training needs on aspects of maritime medicine. Methods: All maritime doctors (110) recognized by the Danish Maritime Authority (DMA) and 100 general practitioners (GPs) were invited to participate. A questionnaire was sent out electronically to gather information on the demographics, breadth of services, follow-up practices, and perceived training needs of the participants. Descriptive statistics described the characteristics of the 2 groups. Results: The training priorities of maritime doctors were rules and regulations (68.7%) followed by working conditions and health risks aboard ship (62.8%). The self-rated training priorities of the GPs were working conditions and health risks aboard ship (44.1%), occupational disease diagnostics, prevention, and follow-up (41.1%), and health and safety at work (38.2%). Conclusion: Members of both medical disciplines were in favor of flexible and accredited training. More specifically, GPs considered a course in occupational risks, diseases, and follow up targeting high-risk professions very important. Maritime doctors suggested the establishment of a website as a one-stop shop for relevant guidelines and information. The small size of the GPs sample prevented a more in-depth gap analysis; however, the results could be used to help the respective authorities establish relevant training programs.