AIS Indexer Development Report

Abstract : A Coverage Index Generator Java application was developed in the summer of 2011, based on the work of Lapinski and Isenor (Estimating Reception Coverage Characteristics of AIS, Lapinski and Isenor, Journal of Navigation, October 2011). This application gathers Automatic Identification System (AIS) messages and produces a coverage map, graphically representing the quality and fidelity of signals received by coastal sensors. The application gathers its inputs either from static data files or a streaming input source. During initial development, problems were identified with the streaming option that could not be fixed at the time. OODA Technologies improved the application in 2012 under call-up 5 to the standing offer W7707-115137. Several bugs were fixed and performance was improved with the streaming option. In this work, the Coverage Index Generator was made more user-friendly and a ship monitoring feature as well as a publishing feature interfacing with the GeoNetwork framework were added. The resulting application, called the AIS Indexer, is a flexible tool that visualizes spatial-temporal gaps of received AIS messages and exploits that information in a defined Area Of Interest (AOI).