A maritime data analytics platform for policy recommendation

The Aegean Sea is characterized by an extremely high marine safety risk, mainly due to the significant increase of the traffic of tankers from and to the Black Sea that pass through narrow straits formed by the 1600 Greek islands. Reducing the risk of a ship accident is therefore vital to all socio-economic and environmental sectors. This paper presents a maritime data analytics platform for policy recommendation. The online tool focuses on extracting aggregated vessel risks using spatiotemporal analysis of multilayer information: vessel trajectories, vessel data, meteorological data, bathymetric/ hydrographic data as well as information regarding environmentally important areas (e.g. protected high-risk areas, etc.). The web interface enables user-friendly spatiotemporal queries at the front-end, while a series of data mining functionalities extracts aggregated statistics regarding: (a) marine risks and accident probabilities for particular areas (b) trajectories clustering information (c) general marine statistics (vessel types, etc.). Employing the above tool, if-then-scenarios can be constructed and resulting statistics and diagrams can provide essential arguments at maritime policy makers.