Vessel Activity

Tracking vessels all over the world

As of March 2019, the Datalab is collecting and storing Automatic Identification System (AIS). This AIS data is sent and stored by all marine vessels worldwide and contains information such as location, heading, speed and much more. This data can be enriched with Lloyd’s register or IHS data that contains additional information about ships such a ship type, owner, flag and many other features.

There are many use cases for the AIS data, one of which is vessel activity. Generally speaking, the customers of Marine companies have ships. These ships travel the world, but will be used more or less actively depending on the economic situation of the company. For instance, oil tankers will be used more actively when oil prices are high, transporting oil to places with high demand. However, when oil prices are low the ships are sometimes used as storage units and will be laying for anchor for longer periods of time.

The Datalab has developed a solution that can tell you precisely how active your customer’s ships are. For each of these ships we use the AIS location data to determine how much kms (or nautical miles) they travel per 24 hours. Using this information, a company can filter exactly down to those customers that are of interest.

For example, if you are looking for very active ship you could say they need to travel at least 300 km (162 nautical miles) per day. You could filter this in the data and get exactly these customers that are very active. Comparing this with your work orders you could quickly see who you should contact for service.

On the other hand, let’s say you want to know which of your customers is hit hardest by economic hardship (e.g. Covid-19). You could filter out those vessels that have not been traveling at all for the last 30 days and immediately see which of your customer’s vessel are laid-up. Important market information when you rely on service.

Are you interested to know more about your customer’s movements or do you have another cool idea for the AIS data? Feel free to contact Koen Haenen (koen.haenen@pon.com).