GIS-Based Maritime Traffic Risk Identification and Assessment

Maritime traffic risk shows significant spatial and temporal differences among vessel activities, navigation conditions, and environments. The further development of Automatic Identification System (AIS) and Geographic Information System (GIS) provides useful tools to analyze vessel trajectories, accident hotspots and environmental risks. This paper reviews the major spatial data, GIS methods and applications used in maritime traffic risk identification and assessment. The main data sources include AIS data, historical accident records, environmental conditions and spatial data. GIS methods include traffic density and hotspot analysis, spatial overlay and spatial relationship analysis. Representative cases from the Malacca Strait, the Istanbul Strait and the Dover Strait, and the Bohai Sea show the different applications. This study employs GIS and various data sources to gain insight into the spatial distribution of maritime traffic and traffic hotspot areas, and historical accident data to identify accident-prone areas. Combining AIS, remote sensing and environmental data can also reveal the temporal and spatial distribution of maritime traffic risk. However, data quality, multi-source data matching and scale issues in space and time are still problems. Future research is needed to improve multi-source data fusion and dynamic risk analysis to further increase the reliability of maritime traffic risk assessment and risk management.