Detecting of Maritime Anomalies and Security Issues Using AIS Data

Abstract

The maritime environment has suffered from high marine traffic. High marine traffic has caused many problems and risks in the maritime and its surrounding environments. The primary objective of this thesis is to analyze historical AIS data and do research on finding the behavior of vessels that are operated in the Baltic Sea. The thesis is focused on detecting anomalies from the ships in three main topics: missing AIS data, speed variation in vessels, and the encounters between different vessels.

The experiments on finding anomalies in ships were done by using the real AIS data. The AIS data was extracted between 4 -16 June 2019 from “The Finnish Transport Infrastructure Agency”. To make experiments more specific to location-wise, a proper measurement boundary was created in the Baltic Sea. The geometry size of the measurement area was created in such a way that no major ports or islands were within that area.

From the experiments, it was found that approximately 8% of the total ships operated in the Baltic sea had missing AIS data at some stages. It was also found that ships’ speed frequently changes while moving. The practical part of the thesis indicates that there were some anomalies presented in the ships. Three main possible reasons for having these types of odd behaviors shown in vessels are unreliability of AIS data, technical issues, and intentional causes. Further research can be extended in this field by addressing the limitation and the problems that are mentioned in this thesis.