Analysis and Modeling of Shipping in the Oceans

Many people assume that it is well known how ships traverse the ocean, i.e., that there are distinct sea lanes which ships follow, almost like interstate highways. In actuality, until the results discussed in this paper, very limited knowledge was available concerning ship movements. Three separate but related products are described which detail this knowledge; Historical Temporal Shipping (HITS), Ocean Route Envelopes (ORE), and Dead-Reckoning (DR) algorithms. The results presented in this paper are a worldwide multi-class shipping distribution, a routing structure usable for historical or real-time ship movement modeling, and movement algorithms which model real-time shipping. Potential uses for these results are: Planning/eval. of aids to navigation; Planning/site choice for acoustic exper.; Modeling ambient noise; Analysis of vital sea lanes; Commodity flow; Safety studies.