Vessel Sailing Patterns Analysis from S-AIS Data Dased on K-means Clustering Algorithm

Automatic Identification System (AIS) provides abundant near real-time information of moving vessels in the sea of the whole world and has been widely used in the fields of vessel collision avoidance, Maritime Situation Awareness (MSA) and ocean surveillance. The development of satellite-based AIS further expands the range of AIS and enables a wide converge of AIS data collection, which solves the problem of lacking AIS data in high-seas. At the same time, AIS data provides a rich source for data mining for maritime traffic analysis. In this paper, a typical clustering algorithm called K-means is applied to deal with the Space-based AIS(S-AIS) data received by “TianTuo-3” satellite developed by National University of Defense Technology. We use Elbow Rule to determine the optimal number of clusters and calculate the normalized standard deviation of COG(Course Over Ground) and SOG(Speed Over Ground) of vessels in south Africa area as their features to conduct clustering. This method is supposed to evaluate vessels' sailing stability and used in detection of low-likelihood behaviors or anomalies of vessels.