An Internet of Things Approach for Extracting Featured Data Using AIS Database: An Application Based on the Viewpoint of Connected Ships

Automatic Identification System (AIS), as a major data source of navigational data, is widely used in the application of connected ships for the purpose of implementing maritime situation awareness and evaluating maritime transportation. Efficiently extracting featured data from AIS database is always a challenge and time-consuming work for maritime administrators and researchers. In this paper, a novel approach was proposed to extract massive featured data from the AIS database. An Evidential Reasoning rule based methodology was proposed to simulate the procedure of extracting routes from AIS database artificially. First, the frequency distributions of ship dynamic attributes, such as the mean and variance of Speed over Ground, Course over Ground, are obtained, respectively, according to the verified AIS data samples. Subsequently, the correlations between the attributes and belief degrees of the categories are established based on likelihood modeling. In this case, the attributes were characterized into several pieces of evidence, and the evidence can be combined with the Evidential Reasoning rule. In addition, the weight coefficients were trained in a nonlinear optimization model to extract the AIS data more accurately. A real life case study was conducted at an intersection waterway, Yangtze River, Wuhan, China. The results show that the proposed methodology is able to extract data very precisely.