Computing performance indicators in detecting shipping collision

Abstract

The need to store and analyze movement data is continuously growing as a consequence of the huge availability of data being collected through GPS receivers, mobile devices, sensors, and others technologies. This paper presents an approach for the storage and analysis of maritime transportation data in a spatial data warehouse. The aim is to identify near-miss situations, which are the contexts where collisions between ships may occur. Moreover, a key performance indicator is proposed to compute the target percentage of safe situations between ships. The proposed spatial data warehouse was modeled, implemented and loaded with the data collected by The Netherland Coastguard, and includes data of shipping movements collected by AIS (Automatic Identification System) base stations. Through the SOLAP analysis of this data set, and taking a sample safety distance of 50 meters between ships, it was possible to verify that the percentage of safe situations is of 92%, going beyond the defined target limit of 90%. The results are promising at the conceptual level and demonstrate the need for further development of key performance indicators for analyzing large movement data sets.