A method is proposed for remotely detecting sulfur content in fuel oil used by ships in emission control areas (ECAs) based on the direct collection of SO2 emission data from the plume of the ship and numerical simulation models. Assuming a ship in the ECA uses fuel oil with compliance fuel sulfur content (FSC), activity-based ship emission assessment model is firstly utilized to calculate the SO2 concentration emitted from the ship. Numerical simulation models are then used to estimate the theoretical SO2 diffusion concentration at the location of the monitoring equipment. The observed SO2 concentration at the same time can then be integrated to estimate the FSC of the ship. A sample of eleven ships was selected to verify the proposed method in Yantian port, Shenzhen, China in June 2018. The result illustrates that the method can remotely detect ships using fuel oil with the FSC greater than 0.146%m/m in the ECAs, the relative error is 46%.@en

In this study, a method for dynamically establishing ship domain in inland waters is proposed to help make decisions about ship collision avoidance. The surrounding waters of the target ship are divided to grids and then calculating the grid densities of ships in each moment to deter-mine the shape and size of ship domain of different types of ships. At last, based on the spatiotem-poral statistical method, the characteristics of ship domains of different types of ship in different navigational environments were analyzed. The proposed method is applied to establish ship domains of different types of ship in Wuhan section of the Yangtze River in January, February, July, and August in 2014. The results show that the size of ship domain increases as the ship size increases in each month. The domain size is significantly influenced by the water level, and the ship domain size in dry seasons is larger than in the wet seasons of inland waters.@en

Formal expression of ship behavior is the basis for developing autonomous navigation systems, which supports the scene recognition, the intention inference, and the rule-compliant actions of the systems. The Convention on the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGs) offers experience-based expressions of ship behavior for human beings, helping the humans recognize the scene, infer the intention, and choose rule-compliant actions. However, it is still a challenge to teach a machine to interpret the COLREGs. This paper proposed an ontological ship behavior model based on the COLREGs using knowledge graph techniques, which aims at helping the machine interpret the COLREGs rules. In this paper, the ship is seen as a temporalspatial object and its behavior is described as the change of object elements in time spatial scales by using Resource Description Framework (RDF), function mapping, and set expression methods. To demonstrate the proposed method, the Narrow Channel article (Rule 9) from COLREGs is introduced, and the ship objects and the ship behavior expression based on Rule 9 are shown. In brief, this paper lays a theoretical foundation for further constructing the ship behavior knowledge graph from COLREGs, which is helpful for the complete machine reasoning of ship behavior knowledge in the future.@en

To improve the ability of ship behavior detection in maritime safety surveillance, a new ship behavior of frequent turning within a certain spatial range, called ship loitering, was found under the ship behavior framework of "anchored-off, straight-sailing, turning". The concept of trajectory redundancy is defined as the quantitative representation of trajectory characteristics of ship loitering. A multi-scale sliding window-based ship loitering detection method is designed to process ship trajectories with different spatial ranges and time duration. Further, a shape recognition model based on a convolutional neural network is constructed and trained to identify four typical shapes of loitering trajectories. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, experiments were conducted using the AIS trajectory data collected from the sea off the Strait of Juan de Fuca in the eastern North Pacific Ocean in 2017 and validated against the manual labeling results. The results illustrate that six general categories of ships produce loitering behaviors with different intentions. The characteristics of the spatial-temporal distribution of ship loitering behaviors can be represented as different shapes. The average precision of ship loitering detection reaches 96.5% and the average accuracy of four typical loitering trajectory shapes reaches 86.2%.@en

Spatiotemporal companion pattern (STCP) mining is one of the means to identify and detect group behavioral activities. To detect the spatiotemporal traveling pattern of ships from massive spatiotemporal trajectory data and to understand the movement law of group ships, this article proposes a feature-driven approach for STCP mining that consists of (1) generating the grid index via the rasterizing of geospace and characterizing trajectory points via the spatiotemporal trajectory grid sequences (STTGSs) of ships; (2) designing filtering rules with the constraints of range, time and distance to construct a candidate set for ship STCP mining; and (3) measuring the STTGS similarity of the associated ships and setting the confidence threshold to realize spatiotemporal companion mining. The effectiveness of the proposed method is practically validated on a real trajectory dataset which is collected from the Taiwan Strait waters. The experimental results are as follows: 825 pairs of associated ships and 225 pairs of accompanying ships are mined when the grid size is 0.05° and the confidence is 0.5. Larger grid sizes can increase the inclusiveness of the associated ship trajectory similarity measurement, which can result in an increase in confidence of pattern. A large number of pseudo-accompaniment ships are extracted to the result set, resulting in a more dispersed distribution of pattern confidence. By verifying the proposed method, accompanying behavioral activities such as ship cooperative operation, companion navigation method, and so on, can be detected. These results can provide a reference for the research of ship group behavior identification and have an important application value for water transportation management.@en

The activity-based methodology is becoming an increasing way to calculate exhaust emissions from ships in a port. Existing studies make great effort to build and analyze ship emission inventory in a variety of ports by applying this method to historical ship trajectory data. This kind of static emission inventory however, cannot meet the needs of real-time ship emission monitoring. This article proposes a method of dynamic calculation of ship exhaust emissions based on real-time ship trajectory data. Firstly, real-time ship AIS messages are partitioned into continuous data blocks and go through a series of pre-processing operations, including trajectory extraction, association and interpolation. Ship activity parameters are then determined by database querying and regression analysis based on ship attributes. Subsequently, an improved activity-based methodology is employed to estimate exhaust emissions from ships in a distributed way. Based on the grid model, regional ship exhaust emissions can be statistically and dynamically calculated by the spatial allocation of all ship emissions. In a case study, a real-time monitoring platform for ship exhaust emissions in Shenzhen port is developed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.@en

The lack of situational awareness is a major cause of ship collisions. Thus, enhancing the situational awareness of the stand-on ship is a key for navigational safety, where the intention estimation of the give-way ship is crucial. According to COLREGs, the stand-on ship is not allowed to take evasive actions until the give-way ship does not take proper actions timely. The stage that needs the stand-on ship to take actions plays as the second protective layer for the ship, which is named as ‘Stand-on Ship as Second Line of Defense’ (SLoD). A method to estimate the intention of the give-way ship and to trigger SLoD is proposed in this article. Four modules of the proposed method include: “data pre-processing” collects all traffic information and determines the ships' obligations; “action identification” pinpoints the turning points; “action uncertainty” generates a bounded reachable velocity considering the give-way ship's maneuverability; “conflict assessment” judges potential collision by using non-linear velocity obstacle algorithm. Several typical encounter scenarios are simulated to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method. The results show that intention estimation of the give-way ship improves the situational awareness of the stand-on ship, which can support the stand-on ship to make collision avoidance decisions.@en

Identification of parameters involved in the linear response model with high precision is a highly cost-effective, as well as a challenging task, in developing a suitable model for the verification and validation (V+V) of some key techniques for autonomous vessels in the virtual testbed, e.g., guidance, navigation, and control (GNC). In order to deal with this identification problem, a novel identification framework is proposed in this paper by introducing the extended state observer (ESO), and the well-evaluated robust weighted least square support vector regression algorithm (RW-LSSVR). A second-order linear response model is investigated in this study due to its wide use in controller designs. Considering the highly possible situation that only limited states could be measured directly, the required but immeasurable states in identifying parameters contained in the response model are approximately estimated by the ESO. Theoretical analysis of the stability is given to show and improve the applicability of the ESO. Simulation studies based on linear response models with predefined parameter values of a cargo vessel and a patrol vessel maneuvering in an open water area are carried out, respectively. Results show that the proposed approach not only estimates immeasurable states with high accuracy but also ensures good performance on the parameter identification of the response model with very close values to the nominal ones. The proven identified approach is economic because it only requires limited kinds of low-cost sensors.@en

Future emission reductions can be guided by a timely evaluation of the impact of emission reduction initiatives in the marine sector. To forecast carbon emission reductions and assess the consequences of various emission reduction techniques, we offer a generic framework for a ship carbon emission prediction model based on several emission reduction scenarios. Three factors—port and ship electrification (PSE), clean fuel substitution (CFS), and ship speed optimization (SSO)—are combined to create emission reduction scenarios with various intensities (lenient, intensive, and aggressive). In the case of Wuhan Port, the effect of carbon reduction was evaluated by comparing various measurements with the baseline scenario. The results indicate that the aggressive PSE and CFS scenarios will reach the carbon peak in 2029 and 2025, respectively. Finally, the possibility of reducing emissions offered by various solutions is examined, and recommendations for port ships' carbon footprint reduction are provided.@en