Real-time identification and tracking of emission from vessels based on Automatic Identification System Data

Real-time and automatic tracking emissions of vessels can help the maritime traffic department and environmental monitoring department to study quantitatively and provide foundation for setting pollution reduction measures, and defining policies for management departments. Traditionaly method is based on fuel consumptions of vessels which need the cooperation of vessel operators; it is hard to realised real-time computation of emission data. Among various sensors used for vessel identification, Automatic Identification System (AIS) have emerged as the state-of-the-art in recent years, providing much richer information than synthetic aperture radar. It has been applied in emission inventory of vessels for several years. This paper provides a review of the AIS-based emission inventory literature which includes empirical, experimental and analytical aspects. At last, we compared the AIS-based method and Fuel-based method and found that AIS-based method can provide more elaborate temporal and spatial emission distribution characteristics.