Maritime Anomaly Detection in a Real-World Scenario: Ever Given Grounding in the Suez Canal

In this paper we present how automatic maritime anomaly detection tools can be successfully applied in real-world situations such as the major event of the container vessel
Ever Given
, which grounded in the Suez Canal on March 23rd 2021. The anomaly detector is designed to process the available sequence of Automatic Identification System (AIS) reports, information from ground-based or satellite radar systems if available, and contextual information defining the expected nominal behavior of navigation. A statistical hypothesis testing procedure is sequentially run to decide whether or not a deviation from the nominal behavior happened within a specific time period, for instance two consecutive data points. We show, based on the recorded AIS data from the
Ever Given
, that the proposed detector could have been triggered and alerted to anomalous behavior fully 19 minutes before the grounding.