Situation Awareness System in a Maritime Port

The Automatic Identification System (AIS) is a transponder-based system that broadcasts the ownship's data (e.g. position, speed, course, ship identification number, and dimensions) on a regular basis. Any other AIS receivers can receive these data. This paper investigate the use of AIS data to develop a system that is able to learn the location of legal fairways around a port given the AIS data collected over a given period of time. The learned fairways information is subsequently used to pre-empt abnormal activities along the fairway. Such a system is therefore capable of better preventing port disasters through better real-time situation awareness.