Potential and benefits of AIS to Ships and Maritime Administrations

The Universal Automatic Identification System (AIS) provides a huge variety of potential applications and services which exceed the well known ship-to-ship data exchange. The purpose of this paper is to address the most important AIS services, in particular the AIS position report and the AIS safety-related and binary messages (“AIS telegrams”). The main issue is the impact of this new technology on the on-board use of AIS in collision avoidance (and its limitations) as well as the impact on shore-based services such as Vessel Traffic Service (VTS), port management and the need of an effective AIS network.