Personal warning system for vessels under bad weather conditions

Many services provide weather forecasts, including severe weather alerts for the marine. It proves that many ships neglect the warnings because they expect to be able to handle the bad weather conditions. In order to identify possible unsafe situations the Coast Guard needs to observe marine vessel traffic 24 hours, 7 days a week. In this paper we propose a system that is able to support the Coast Guard. Ships can be localized and tracked individually using the Automatic Identification System (AIS). We present a system which is able to send a personal alert to ships expected to be in danger now or the near future. Ships will be monitored in the dangerous hours and routed to safe areas in the shortest time. The system is based on AIS data, probabilistic reasoning and expertise from the Coast Guard. A first prototype will be presented for open waters around the Netherlands.