Identification of Maritime Areas With High Vessel Traffic Based on Polygon Shape Similarity

As new forms of industries emerge in marine spaces due to global environmental protection trends and the promotion of recreational activities, traditional navigation areas for vessels are also being affected. To ensure safe vessel passage and effective vessel traffic management in response to evolving maritime environments, navigational routes for ships must be exclusively established. Numerous studies have attempted to derive shipping routes from historical vessel-traffic data; however, the final forms of polygon shapes representing routes have not been produced. Hence, this study aimed to extract polygonal routes based on densely trafficked maritime areas. Data collected from the automatic identification system (AIS) onboard maritime vessels were utilized to analyze dense navigational areas, which were then divided into 1 km grids. Through a spatial-temporal analysis method utilized from The European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODnet), the occupancy time of the vessels in each grid was calculated to extract dense traffic areas. The dense traffic areas extracted in grid form were processed using the geographical identification system to create polygonal routes by smoothing and simplification. The resulting polygons exhibited different shapes depending on the analysis period. To extract a unique representative route polygon, the CRiteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation (CRITIC) method was employed to calculate the shape similarity based on the centroid, shape index, and overlapping area ratio of the polygons. The extracted representative polygon demonstrated the highest shape similarity compared with the other polygons and was utilized by 95.93% of the vessels navigating the analyzed area. The study results can contribute to identifying essential areas for vessels in maritime zones by proposing representative shipping routes.