Innovating Waterway Route Planning as a Service for Marine Traffic Applications

Waterway pattern mining and route planning are essential system services in maritime applications to support safety, efficiency, and sustainability goals. In this paper, first, we propose a novel waterway pattern mining method. It allows a compact footprint design and is featured with manifold granularities, waypoint and directional tagging, forming a knowledge base with rich traffic features. Second, relying on the extracted waterway patterns as “map context”, we enhance the Theta<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">*</sup> path planning algorithm by taking the extracted traffic properties into consideration. An integrated solution combining both the waterway patterns and the enhanced Theta<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">*</sup> algorithm has been applied to several domain use cases: a) waterway pattern based trajectory reconstruction; b) passage plan generation for various types of vessels; and c) vessel movement estimation and forecasting. These use cases proved the usefulness and practicality of the proposed solution, its feasibility for other port waters, and potential use on a global scale.