AMINESS: a platform for environmentally safe shipping

Reducing the possibility of ship accidents in the Aegean Sea is important to all economic, environmental, and cultural sectors of Greece. Despite the increased traffic and the related obvious risk, there are currently no national-level monitoring policies in Greece. To this end, we develop the AMINESS platform that will integrate information from multiple sources (e.g. real-time vessel movements, weather data, traffic patterns, information on type and cargo of vessels, environmental data etc.) as well as historical maritime data. This platform offers a web portal accessible by ship owners, policy makers and the scientific community, which can be used to (a) suggest vessel and environmentally optimal safe route planning, considering both the risk as well as the cost (in fuel and time) of the alternative routes, (b) deliver real-time alerts for ships (e.g. danger of collision or capsizing, suspicious/illegal behaviour of vessels), and (c) support policy recommendations both by analyzing statistics and patterns as well as by simulating the impact of different policies. Through these services, the platform aims directly to reduce the risk of a ship accident and consequently to contribute in the safety, management and monitoring of the sea environment and the Aegean Sea in particular. In this paper, we present our ongoing research and development of the AMINESS platform. In particular, we start by presenting the project's general architectural scheme and then the specifications and characteristics of the individual components and modules that make up this system. We particularly focus on some components, especially on the tools that fuse and process the information providing the optimal routing, the alerting and the policy recommendation outputs of the system.