Completeness and Accuracy of a Wide-Area Maritime Situational Picture based on Automatic Ship Reporting Systems

Automatic ship reporting systems (AIS – Automatic identification System, LRIT – Long Range Identification and Tracking, VMS – Vessel Monitoring System) today allow global tracking of ships. One way to display the results is in a map of current ship positions over an area of interest, the Maritime Situational Picture (MSP). The MSP is dynamic and must be created by fusing the reporting systems' messages, constructing ship tracks and predicting ship positions to correct for latency especially in the case of AIS received by satellite which forms the bulk of the data. This paper discusses the completeness of the resulting MSP and the accuracy of its positions, quantifying the additional value of the individual data sources.