FVRD: Fishing Vessel Relations Discovery Through VMS Trace Analysis

The sailing information of fishing vessels are recorded through Vessel Monitoring Systems (VMS), which provides the basis to discover the spatial-temporal pattern of fishing activities. Previous research calculates the fishing density distribution from VMS traces, however, the relationships between fishing vessels are neglected. These kinds of relations, such as fishing vessel groups, may have some impact on fishing density distributions. This paper reveals the potential to construct fishing vessel relations through VMS trace analysis. It takes the VMS traces of all fishing related vessels in the East China Sea in 2016 as the object. The proposed system exploits the parallel Map-Reduce computation model to evaluate the spatial closeness among vessels in order to construct the vessel relation model over different time periods. After constructing the relation model, some key conclusions are revealed from the relation model. It shows that 72% vessels share the cooperation relations over one week, confirming the intuition that most fishing vessels are sailing together for fishing. Moreover, 42% vessels are in the long-term cooperations (over four weeks), representing the core members in each individual group.