Generation and Application of Maritime Route Networks: Overview and Future Research Directions

The development of advanced ship positioning and intelligent sensing technologies has transformed navigation at sea, moving beyond reliance on captains’ experience and standard routes. The trajectories traversed by ships at sea contain valuable data that can be mined to map maritime transportation networks and inform intelligent navigation systems. Ship trajectory data at scale enables discovery of the underlying network of maritime routes, providing key insights for applications like intelligent navigation, abnormal behavior detection, trajectory prediction, and maritime traffic pattern analysis. This study reviews the development of research on maritime route networks (MRNs) derived from ship trajectory data. It summarizes the technical process to construct a MRN, contrasting approaches for identifying waypoints, extracting routes, and representing the overall maritime traffic network structure. Finally, this study explores potential applications of MRNs and anticipates promising future research directions in this domain.