Characteristics of Ship Movements in a Fairway

Abstract In a coastal area, all of the vessels are always exposed to the potential risk, taking into the maritime accident statistics account over the last decades. To manage vessels underway safety, the characteristics of ship movements in a fairway should be recognized by VTS system or VTS operators. The IMO has already mandated the shipboard carriage of AIS since 2004, as stated in SOLAS Chapter V Regulation 19. As a result, the static and dynamic information of AIS data has been collected for vessel traffic management in the coastal areas and used for VTS. This research proposes a simple algorithm of recognizing potentially risky ships by observing their trajectories on the fairway. The static and dynamic information of AIS data are collected and the curvature for the ship trajectory is surveyed. The proposed algorithm finds out the irregularity of ship movement. The algorithm effectively monitors the change of navigation pattern from the curvature analysis of ship trajectory. Our method improves VTS functions in an intelligent way by analyzing the navigation pattern of vessels underway.