AIS Data-Based for Statistics and Analysis of Maritime Traffic Dangerous

Features: A Case Study of San Diego Costal Water

Pinglin Wang, Wenjun Zhang, Jianchuan Yin, Lianbo Li, Haibo Xie, Shuangfu Ma
Navigation College, Dalian Maritime University, Liaoning 116026
E-mail:wenjunzhang@dlmu.edu.cn

Abstract: For analyzing the distribution characteristics of maritime traffic dangers and ensure the safety of ships
navigating at sea, plotting the ship’s trajectory and making statistic based on the relevant dynamic data that can be
extracted and analyzed from the Automatic Indentification System (AIS) information, the Distance to Closet Point of
Approach (DCPA) between any two ships have been computed and applied. Through constructing the innovative
three-dimensional bubbles chart to reflect the spatial characteristics from the DCPA matrix. Utilizing the Kernel
Density Estimation (KDE) method, draws the heat map in the vicinity of San Diego sea area, measures the traffic
danger characteristics of the costal sea area, and compares the analysis results with ArcGIS Pro 2.3. It reflects that the
analysis results are consistent with the actual situation. The heat map has the powerful scientificity and practicability,
can accurately measure the traffic distribution in the sea area, and provides auxiliary references for the planning and
design of the ship's routing system and maritime traffic safety management.
Key Words: Maritime Navigational Safety, Ship Automatic Identification System, Kernel Density Estimation,
Distance to Closet Point of Approach

the data [10].

1 INTRODUCTION
Following the fast growth with the world economic
globalization, maritime transportation has become
increasingly heavy, which is of crucial importance to the
world economy. Therefore, the safety of maritime
transportation should not be underestimated. Meanwhile,
with the rapid development of data acquisition,
networking, and partitioned storage technologies, "Big
Data" has rapidly expanded into various scientific and
engineering fields [1].
AIS as a monitoring system, AIS equipment allows ships
to automatically exchange navigation data with
shore-based receiving stations and satellites which
include the ship's unique identifier, location, course,
speed and so forth [2].
AIS data contains a wealth of information, AIS data
mining has become a hotspot issue in current underlying
research fields. With the widespread application of AIS,
the research on AIS data is mainly focused on the
following aspects: Using AIS data for trajectory analysis,
drawing vessel traffic flow density maps to facilitate the
perception of maritime traffic situations and vessel traffic
management [3-4]; Training historical AIS data for ship
anomaly detection and motion prediction [5-7]; Risk
analysis of maritime traffic accidents [8-9].
In view of the massive amount of AIS data, traditional
methods for analysis and evaluation have become
overwhelmed. For the sake of achieve maritime traffic
supervision as soon as possible, to ensure the safety of
ship navigation and sustainable development of the
marine environment, it is urgent to seek new data mining
methods for better discovering the underlying laws behind

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation
of China (Grant No. 51879024), and the Liaoning Provincial Natural
Science Foundation (Grant Nos. 2018228002, 20180551040 and
20180520034).
There exists a new trend and hotspot research interests on
the regional danger of ships currently. Due to the large
flow of ships along the coast of the port and traffic
conflicts caused by ship navigation and maritime
operations, the risk of maritime navigation have been
rising sharply [11]. The growth of the world fleets, both
in number of ships and tonnage, tends to increase the ship
accidents, and ship collisions are no exception, these
issues of maritime traffic safety must not be ignored [12].
Wen [13] presented a marine traffic complexity model to
evaluate the status of the traffic situation, and it uses the
complexity to investigate the degree of crowding and the
risks of collision. Mazaheri et al. [14] considered vessel
traffic as one of the main factors affecting the expected
frequency of ship groundings in their study aimed at
determining the statistical dependency between traffic
density and the distribution of traffic. Li [15] applied petri
networks to causation analysis and the structured
analytical network of vessel collisions, which was of great
benefit to studies on vessel collisions. Park et al. [16]
assessed the basic parameter of speed, and they proposed
a regression model to show the effects of mean speed,
standard deviation of speed, and the flow per route on the
potential collision rates. Li [17] proposes a gridded
geography information system GIS-based relation
analysis model using the historical AIS data and accident
records. Most of the researches on the vessel navigational
danger mainly focus on the waters near the port and
waterway, a few studies on the traffic dangers near the
coastal seas area. Coastal sailing ships have relatively
constant course and speed that tiny changes with ship’s
maneuvering, and the vessel’s maneuverability remains
stable. Hammering at the danger of coastal traffic can
more accurately reflects the true state of the sea area. It is
more precise to find valuable traffic laws, and more
beneficial to the coastal traffic planning research and
maritime navigation safety.

978-1-7281-5855-6/20/$31.00 2020
c IEEE 3671

Authorized licensed use limited to: University of Canberra. Downloaded on October 04,2020 at 10:52:36 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 This paper utilizes AIS data to measure the ship's
navigational danger features primarily from the distance
between ships and speed, in order to find more valuable
internal laws. This article selects the coastal waters of San
Diego Port. The historical AIS data on October 10, 2017
has been employed as a research sample to excavate its
traffic conditions, congested waters, and the distribution
of dangerous locations.
The main structure of the rest of this article is as follows.
The second part introduces the selection of ship traffic
data, preprocesses the AIS data received in the research
sea area, then screens out and removes wrong sample data
to improve the accuracy of the research. The third part
mainly expounds the method of this paper. The fourth
part details the ship traffic conditions and dangerous
situations in the waters near San Diego. Finally arrange
summary.
2 DATA PROCESSING AND ANALYSIS
2.1 Regional Selection
To facilitate related research, the United States has
divided its coastal waters into 20 regions, as shown in
Figure 1. Each area has been divided with equal intervals,
the traffic flow and the quantity of ships in different areas
varies diverse, and the navigation environment in each
area also transfer complicated. By studying the AIS data
in individual areas to explore the navigation rules of ships
in the area and further analyze the characteristics of water
traffic in the area.
Fig. 1. Regional division of American waters area.
The primary purpose of the AIS was to help reduce the
risk of collision in the first place [18]. This study selects
the AIS data of the tenth region as the research sample, on
account of the tenth region covers most of the coastline
and coastal waters of the west coast of the United States
and numerous ships voyage past this region. Due to the
large amount of data, this article first try to selected AIS
data from the tenth region on October 10, 2017 as the
research sample, and the amount of data for one day also
can enough to carry out research to ensure the accuracy of
the results. The specific circumstances of this area are
shown in Table 1.
3672 2020 Chinese Control And Decision Conference (CCDC 2020)
Authorized licensed use limited to: University of Canberra. Downloaded on October 04,2020 at 10:52:36 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
Table 1.Status of AIS Data in the Tenth Region on October
10, 2017
Track Points Ship Tracks Ship Types
993701 2070 18
Based on the AIS location information, Figure 2 plots the
distribution of ships throughout the tenth day of October
10, 2017. For the original sample contains a large amount
of data, and the error data has not been eliminated, from
the map seeing that only a series of dense points, and the
traffic conditions and the sailing rules of the ship cannot
be analyzed.
Fig. 2. Ship trajectories map in the tenth region on October 10,
2017.
In order to conduct further research, this article further
narrows the scope of the study. In the tenth region, a
rectangle composed of the four coordinate points shown
in Table 2 is tuning as the new study area. This region
nears the San Diego Port, which is a natural port in San
Diego Bay in southern California. It has advantages in
geographical location, climate and modern equipment,
attracting more and more merchant ships to sail and berth,
which makes San Diego Port become one of the best and
busiest seaports in the world. As a consequence, there are
enormous amount of ships in this area and a proper
distance from the coast. It is located at the junction of the
United States and Mexico. There are many ships entering
and leaving the port, which can more accurately depict the
traffic conditions in this water area.
Table 2. Study Sea Area Coordinates
Longitude 120.0039eW~125.9954eW
Latitude 23.9354eN~32.3373eN
After the preliminary data processing, removing the
obvious data error result from the AIS sending and
receiving equipment errors and data decoding errors, the
obtained AIS research sample information is shown in
Table 3, and plotted the ships’ trajectories as illustrated
below in Figure 3.
Table 3. Status of AIS Data in the Tenth Region on October
10, 2017.
Track Points Ship Tracks Ship Types
21012 47 5
There are 47 ships in this area. From the trajectories chart
we can see that the regular routes of this sea area are in
turn along with the direction of the northwest-southeast
trending. The encounter process is one of which the
waters with relatively high navigational risks, that is one ships will be short, but this does not affect the traffic law
of the reasons why we chose this area as the study area. of the whole region.
Table 4. Ship Type Code
Code Ship Types Percentage
1004 Freight Ship 70.21%
1012 Passenger Ship 2.13%
1020 Research Vessel 2.13%
1024 Tank Ship 23.40%
1025 Towing Vessel 2.13%
The statistics of vessels course and speed distribution of
all acount of ship trajectory points in this area as
illustrated in figure 5. The average speed of the ship in
this area reaches 13.67 knots by count. It can be vividly
derived from the picture that the ships in this area are in a
state of constant speed and most of the course located in
the lower semicircle, which is consistent with the course
Fig. 3. Vessel’s trajectories map in the study area. described in the track chart.

2.2 Data Statistics and Analysis

As vividly recorded in figure 4 showed the statistics of
the voyages density of different types of ships in the study
area in one day.

Fig. 5. Ship course and speed distribution map.

3 THE CALCULATION OF DCPA

Fig. 4. Navigation status of different ships types in one day.

The codes in the figure represent the corresponding types

of ships, as shown in Table 4. From the data in the table,
it is clear that the types of ships in the sea area are mainly
cargo ships and oil tankers. Plainly, trade route occupied
the chief constituent of this area. Cargo ships and oil
tankers sail through the water throughout the day, mainly
concentrated in the early 08:00 am. It is a relatively busy
sea trade route, but there will also be passenger ships and
research vessels sailing at 06:00 am before, while
tugboats are only at 07:00 am-08:00 am sailing in the
morning. Due to this study only intercepted part of the
area, a tiny of the ship's trajectories only show part of
trajectories, and the remaining trajectories are not in the
Fig. 6. The encounter situation map of two ship.
scope of the study. Therefore, the trajectories of some

2020 Chinese Control And Decision Conference (CCDC 2020) 3673

Authorized licensed use limited to: University of Canberra. Downloaded on October 04,2020 at 10:52:36 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 Figure 6 demonstrates the state of movement of the two
ships at any times, own ship O and target ship T,
respectively move with different speed and course. And
Vo represent the speed vector line of own ship, Vt is the
speed vector line of the target ship, and Vr is the relative
speed vector line of the target ship relative to its own ship.
T o is on behalf of the heading of own ship, and Tt stand
for the heading of target ship, T r is the relative motion
heading of the target ship relative to the own ship, and the
red straight line indicates the DCPA among two ships.
The relative speed of the target ship relative to its own
ship is calculated as follows:
Vr Vo2  Vt 2  2 | Vo ˜Vt | cos(T t  T o )
From a mathematical perspective, the DCPA calculation
equation between own ship O and target ship T at any
time is as follows:
| yT  xT tan T r |
DCPA | OP |
tan 2 T r  1
Let V be a linear space (or vector space) over the real
number field R. If V defines a positive definite bilinear g
(g is called the inner product), then V is called (for g)
Inner Product Space or Euclidean Space (sometimes
called Euclidean Space only when V is a finite dimension).
Specifically, g is a binary real-valued function on V,
which satisfied with the following conditions.
g ( x, y ) g ( y , x ) (3)
g ( x  y, z ) g ( x, z )  g ( y , z )
g ( kx, y ) kg ( x, y ) (5)
g ( x, y) t 0 , and g ( x, y) 0 holds only if x 0 (6)
Here x , y and z are the arbitrary vectors in V , and k is
any real number.
In Euclidean space, the Euclidean distance between the
points ( x1 , x2 ,..., xn ) and ( y1 , y2 ,..., yn ) is defined as:
n 1
d (¦ | xi  yi |2 ) 2
1
region, it was found that the distance between the two
ships (the MMSI is 565565000 and 636092799) varied
nonlinearly. This study maps the trajectory of the two
ships with red stripes, and the closest encounter points are
connected by a black straight line. From the trajectories
and the distance change curve, it can be seen that
although the two trajectories cross each other, it does not
mean that the two ships collided, but just passed the same
location at different times. It can be known from the
figure 7 and the calculated data, the closest distance
between the two ships is only 3.16 nautical miles, there
exist more risky in this case.
(1)
(2)
Fig. 7. The change in distance between two ships with MMSI
codes of 565565000 and 636092799 over time.
In all tracks, seek the distance among two adjacent tracks.
If the distance between any two points of two tracks in the
study area exceeds 100 nautical miles, it is unnecessary to
calculate the distance between two tracks. Therefore, 81
pairs of ships are computed in this study, and obtained the
(4) nearest distance of corresponding time sequence.
After calculating the distance between the 81 pairs of
samples, a three-dimensional bubbles chart is drawn as
shown in Figure 8.
(7)

This study uses the European distance to measure the

closest distance between two adjacent ships, in order to
indirectly weigh the risk among two ships. The smaller of
European distance within two ships possess, the closer
between two ships will be achieved, resulted in the more
dangerous the situation will be. This article first sorts the
trajectories in the area, compares the trajectories of 47
ships in chronological order, and calculates the Euclidean
distance among any trajectory point of the first trajectory
Fig. 8. Three-dimensional bubbles chart.
point in O ship and any trajectory point at the
corresponding time in ship T included the distance matrix In the space, each bubble corresponds to the closest
DistOT inter the ships, afterward from this distance matrix, distance that each two ships will encounter in the study
the closest distance also can be briefly drawn. area. The same color represents the distance which a
When the ships encounter to each other, according to this certain ship encounter any other ships. Different colors
distance, it can intuitively depict the change trend of the indicate the distance between different ships’ encounter.
entire distance between the two ships from the beginning The larger the bubble, the greater the distance between the
to the end, exactly as portrayed in Figure 7. In the study two ships hold, and the safer the situation will be. On the
contrary, the smaller the bubble present, the nearer

3674 2020 Chinese Control And Decision Conference (CCDC 2020)

Authorized licensed use limited to: University of Canberra. Downloaded on October 04,2020 at 10:52:36 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
encounter distance between the two ships come along, channel. In addition, the analysis can also spot the
and the more dangerous situation will appear. dangerous points in the navigation water area, as well as
The bubble chart can also indirectly remark the ship the abnormal ship waypoints, etc., providing auxiliary
density and navigation risk in the water area. The more reference for ship traffic supervision. Generally, it is
bubbles float, the more ships there exist, signal for the based on the analysis and expression of discrete points,
heavier density of ships, and the more congested of the lines or surfaces, or the thermodynamic diagram or heat
waters will be. diagram obtained from the density analysis of continuous
surfaces, emphasizing the spatial location and basic
4 MARITIME TRAFFIC FEATURES spatial distribution characteristics.
4.1 KDE Method After rasterizing the study water area and analyzing the
kernel density with the radius of the track point as 20000
Kernel density estimation is a nonparametric method (layer unit), the thermodynamic diagram of the track point
served to estimate probability density function. It is n as depicted in Figure 9 drew. The darker of the color as
sample points of independent and identically distributed the picture present, the denser of the track points amass,
F . The kernel is parameterized by its width h , which imply the busier the water area. It can be derived from the
can be either fixed (identical for all observed data) or figure that the congested area of the water is mainly
adaptive. Assuming the probability density function is f , concentrated in the upper part of the northwest. At the
and the kernel density is estimated as follows: intersection point, there are basically red dense areas.
Although the situation of ships crossing in this water area
1 n 1 n x  xi
f h ( x) ¦ K h ( x  xi )
n 1
¦
nh i 1
K(
h
) (8) are rarely happened, it may be more rough for ships
sailing for the northeast-southwest bound of this water
area, and it is more tough for seafarers to avoid collision.
Among them:
(1) k represents a kernel function (nonnegative, integral
take an index of 1, consistent with the probability density
property, and the mean value is 0).
(2) h ! 0 expresses a smoothing parameter, which is
called bandwidth.
K x
(3) K h ( x) ( ) mean the scaled kernel.
h h
Kernel density analysis is utilized to remark the density of
an element in its surrounding neighborhood. Through the
interpolation of discrete point data, the points falling into
the search area have different weights. The points or lines
close to the search center will be given a larger weight.
Conversely, the weight decreasing smaller, and the
distribution of its calculation results become smoother.
In this paper, we rasterizing the research region, and a
hexagon honeycomb grid with side length of 0.1 nautical
mile is established in the first place. Afterward computing
the trajectory points falling into each honeycomb grid, the
more trajectory points fall into the mesh, the more weight
the mesh is given, and the grid is regarded as a weight
center point. As the density of the points increases, the
color of the mesh becomes darker.
4.2 Heat Map Plotting
Heat map is a thermal image which can be exploited to
visualize the density of the points in the map through the Fig. 9. The thermal diagram of ship tracks in the sea area.
density function, and the potential law behind the data can To verify the validity of the test results, ArcGIS Pro 2.3 is
be well understood through the heat map. It not only can also employed to cluster the density of the water area. The
provide intuitive information, but also a powerful data heat map obtained is described in Figure 10. It can be
analysis weapon. It is one of the hot trends in the current obtained from the figure that the track of the yellow area
research to make full use of the heat map and its reflect quite obvious, indicating that the track density of
displayed information to analyze the data of marine traffic the yellow area possesses the densest ship voyage,
characteristics. It allows us to perceive the density of followed by the red area. The ship density distribution in
points independently of the scaling factor. The heat map the whole area show linearly recursive like a mountain.
can also vividly depict the traffic distribution of the The darker of the color emerge in the picture, the higher
stretch of water.Beyond that, from the heat map can also density of the ship's track present, the more dangerous of
perceive the regular routes of ships cruising in the water

2020 Chinese Control And Decision Conference (CCDC 2020) 3675

Authorized licensed use limited to: University of Canberra. Downloaded on October 04,2020 at 10:52:36 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 ship's navigation appear. Besides, we can also arrive that
the trend of the yellow area is basically parallel to the
coastline, and basically consistent with the regular route
of the water area. It draws that the ship clustering results
are consistent with the result exhibited in Figure 9, which
can correctly reflect the traffic situation of the water area.
Fig. 10. The heat map of ship tracks in the sea area.
5 SUMMARY
This paper is devoted to statistical analysis of the real
historical AIS data for the purpose of researching the
distribution of ship traffic dangerous features in the
coastal waters of San Diego. First of all, we use statistical
methods to summarize the types and quantity distribution
of ships in the range of water area, and the time period of
ships passing. Afterward draw the corresponding
trajectory map aiming to present the basic situation of the
traffic flow. Secondly, by using Euclidean distance to
calculate the DCPA between any trajectories for acquiring
distance matrix between all ships in the area, and
three-dimensional bubble chart has been portrayed to
show the dangerous situation within the water area.
Finally, for the study of sea area gridding, the Kernel
Density Estimation method has been utilized to draw the
heat map of the water area, which more directly reflects
the navigation risk of the water area. Most studies
measure the risk of sailing waters through the ship
domain, and this way cannot fully reflect the overall
traffic characteristics, while the heat map can fully reflect
the navigation risk of the waters.
In the near future, further studies should be conducted, for
instance, to the grid optimization, to consider more
environment and human factors, contributed for
promoting the AIS data in-depth study and excavation.
REFERENCES
[1] L. B. Zhao, G. Y. Shi, and J. X. Yang, Ship trajectories
pre-processing based on AIS data, The Journal of Navigation,
Vol.71, No.5, 1210-1230, 2018.
[2] P. R. Lei, Mining maritime traffic conflict trajectories from a
massive AIS data, Knowledge and Information Systems, Vol.62,
No.1, 259-285, 2020.
[3] M. Fiorini, A. Capata, and D. D. Bloisi, AIS data visualization for
maritime spatial planning (MSP), International Journal of
e-Navigation and Maritime Economy, Vol.5, 45-60, 2016.
3676 2020 Chinese Control And Decision Conference (CCDC 2020)
Authorized licensed use limited to: University of Canberra. Downloaded on October 04,2020 at 10:52:36 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
[4] L. Wu, Y. Xu, Q. Wang, F. Wang, and Z. Xu, Mapping global
shipping density from AIS data, Journal of Navigation, Vol.70, No.1,
67-81, 2017.
[5] Y. Wu, A. Patterson, R. D. Santos, and N. L. Vijaykumar, Topology
preserving mapping for maritime anomaly detection, International
Conference on Computational Science and Its Applications,
313-326, 2014.
[6] F. Mazzarella, M. Vespe, A. Alessandrini, et al., A novel anomaly
detection approach to identify intentional AIS on-off switching,
Expert Systems with Applications, Vol.78, 110-123, 2017.
[7] A. Dobrkovic, M. E. Lacob, J. van Hillegersberg, M. R. Mes, and M.
Glandrup, Towards an approach for long term AIS-based prediction
of vessel arrival times, Logistics and Supply Chain Innovation,
281-294, 2016.
[8] A. Mazaheri, J. Montewka, P. Kotilainen, O. V. E. Sormunen, and P.
Kujala, Assessing grounding frequency using ship traffic and
waterway complexity, The Journal of Navigation, Vol.68, No.1,
89-106, 2015.
[9] W. B. Zhang, C. Kopca, J. J. Tang, D. F. Ma, and Y. H. Wang, A
systematic approach for collision risk analysis based on AIS data,
The Journal of Navigation, Vol.70, No.5, 1117-1132, 2017.
[10]S. Pan, J. B. Yin, Extracting Shipping Route Patterns by Trajectory
Clustering Model Based on Automatic Identification System Data,
Sustainability, Vol.10, No.7, 2327, 2018.
[11]L. B. Li, W. Y. Lu, J. W. Niu, J. P. Liu, and D. X. Liu, AIS
data-based decision model for navigation risk in sea areas, Journal
of Navigation, Vol.71, No.3, 664-678, 2018.
[12]P. A. M. Silveira, A. P. Teixeira, C. G. Soares, Use of AIS data to
characterise marine traffic patterns and ship collision risk off the
coast of Portugal, The Journal of Navigation,Vol.66, No.6, 879-898,
2013.
[13]Y. Q. Wen, Y. M. Huang, C. H. Zhou, et al., Modelling of marine
traffic flow complexity, Ocean Engineering, Vol.104, 500-510,
2015.
[14]A. Mazaheri, J. Montewka, P. Kotilainen, O. V. E. Sormunen, and P.
Kujala, Assessing grounding frequency using ship traffic and
waterway complexity, The Journal of Navigation, Vol.68, No.1,
2015.
[15]S. S. Li, Z. Y. Zheng, Petri net based vessel collision accident
causation analysis, Journal of Dalian Maritime University, Vol.36,
No.4, 5-7, 2010.
[16]J. W. Park, J. S. Jeong, G. K. Park, An effect of traffic speed on
maritime accidents, Soft Computing in Intelligent Control, 29–43,
2014.
[17]M. X. Li, J. M. Mou, R. R. Liu, et al., Relational model of accidents
and vessel traffic using AIS data and GIS: A case study of the
western port of Shenzhen city, Journal of Marine Science and
Engineering, Vol.7, No.6, 163, 2019.
[18]Z. G. Zhang, J. C. Yin, N. N. Wang., and Z. G. Hui, Vessel traffic
flow analysis and prediction by an improved PSO-BP mechanism
based on AIS data, Evolving Systems, Vol.10, No.3, 397-407, 2019.