Your business partner from space: How satellite vessel monitoring system OWM AIS helps to run business effectively

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.
- William Blake

As you know, who owns the information can either save the world or destroy it. Timely information can protect your health, trigger a stock market crisis or help to win the war.

In today’s world there are many different ways to retrieve data: around our planet circling satellites, drones are flying everywhere and all the sensors are used with complex signal processing, the people are implanting chips all over the world.

At the same time, with regard to satellites, the steady tendency is to reduce them in size, and make them cheaper, which significantly affects the cost, speed of data acquisition and volumes. And there were small satellites supplying huge amounts of data that need to be somehow handled. And handled as fast as possible. And here comes the help of modern technologies, such as cloud, the Internet of Things and Big data.

Behind all this is a real revolution in the field of satellite data. It is already underway and will continue, the further the more interesting things will become. The relatively young field of application of satellite data is collecting AIS data from space — AIS vessels monitoring — tracking the movement of ships along the coastlines and on the open sea and oceans.

This information is very useful for owners of any business, one way or another related to shipping:

• for port services — port owner can check the information provided by the ship on course and destination;

• for ship-owners, shipping agent, freight forwarders and charterers AIS is able to determine the current location of the vessel and monitoring the route on a map, find out complete list of parameters for each AIS vessel and reports to effectively manage small and medium sized fleet;

• for financiers, economists — analysis of the trends, risks, and helps to identify new business opportunities, determining the size of the market and the competition assessment. For example, information about how oil tankers move along the sea routes helps to make certain predictions, which makes it possible to go a little ahead of the market. Similarly, you can keep track of cargo ships, and after cargo carriage — is the blood of the world economy. 

Density map: density of vessels within a specific year or month in the past on interactive map to analyze global picture of marine traffic

But to use all this information, a complex analysis is required, which allows to receive it in visual form, and in a short period of time. For example, the maximum time passed from the moment of receiving the data from the satellites to the moment when the data is available through API OWM AIS services keeps within half an hour.

JSON API to current and historical satellite AIS data for vessel or group of vessels

OWM AIS service enables online mode to watch the movement of about 300,000 ships filtered by more than 50 types and create interactive maps for displaying movement of vessels for each fleet type — such as freight, passenger, and fishing or combined. The presence of historical satellite AIS data, which covers both coasts and oceans, broken down by month, also allows you to display the density of vessels on the interactive map within a particular year or month in the past, to analyze the global picture of maritime traffic.

A very interesting is application area of historical data and dynamic satellite maps. Their joint analysis can greatly facilitate the investigation of accidents, incidents have occurred in the open ocean, as well as help in tracking the pirates and violations of contracts.