Big data-driven automatic generation of ship route planning in complex maritime environments

With the rapid development of the global economy, maritime transportation has become much more convenient due to large capacities and low freight. However, this means the sea lanes are becoming more and more crowded, leading to high probabilities of marine accidents in complex maritime environments. According to relevant historical statistics, a large number of accidents have happened in water areas that lack high precision navigation data, which can be utilized to enhance navigation safety. The purpose of this work was to carry out ship route planning automatically, by mining historical big automatic identification system (AIS) data. It is well-known that experiential navigation information hidden in maritime big data could be automatically extracted using advanced data mining techniques; assisting in the generation of safe and reliable ship planning routes for complex maritime environments. In this paper, a novel method is proposed to construct a big data-driven framework for generating ship planning routes automatically, under varying navigation conditions. The method performs density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise first on a large number of ship trajectories to form different trajectory vector clusters. Then, it iteratively calculates its centerline in the trajectory vector cluster, and constructs the waterway network from the node-arc topology relationship among these centerlines. The generation of shipping route could be based on the waterway network and conducted by rasterizing the marine environment risks for the sea area not covered by the waterway network. Numerous experiments have been conducted on different AIS data sets in different water areas, and the experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the framework of the ship route planning proposed in this paper.