New Method to Appraise the Maritime Traffic Situations

The maritime traffic situation is very important for the maritime safety authority to make appropriate and practical decisions. The method to appraise the maritime traffic situation affects greatly the appraisal results of real maritime traffic situation. Vessel's Automatic Identification System (AIS) contained rich ship movement information. Huge AIS within the port limit contains rich information of the real-time maritime traffic situation. Using the huge and real-time AIS information, this paper probed into the novel and practical method to appraise the maritime traffic situation. The comprehensive spatial and temporal distributions of change rate of ship's course and speed and ship encounter indicated the real-time maritime traffic situation area and their development trend in the given water. This method was applied to analyze of marine traffic situations of Xiamen bay and proved to be practical and useful to provide advices for marine traffic decision-making and management of marine authorities.