For almost two decades now, the automatic identification system (AIS) has contributed to increasing the safety of navigation at sea. In addition to that, the system can provide valuable data for surveillance of maritime traffic on a global scale. For reliable tracking the movement of vessels with AIS, it is important to correctly identify the craft. Nowadays, such identification is based entirely on the maritime mobile service identity (MMSI). Despite extensive research being done on the subject of anomalies detectable within the AIS, with emphasis on spotting and correcting erratic vessel movements, a possibility of accidental falsification of MMSI leading to incorrect track reconstruction of a vessel has so far been neglected. This study focuses on analysing hypothetical situations when the MMSI of an AIS transponder on board a vessel is altered within the transponder software and a valid AIS data message is sent with a false MMSI which accidentally belongs to a completely different vessel. Since such MMSI transformation leaves no traces, an assessment of a speed-based plausibility is additionally proposed to figure out how many MMSI based injections of false AIS track points can be detected.

Context: From the perspective of marine traffic engineering, a system of port waterways is composed of a set of waterways (port areas), such as approach channels, port entrance, inner fairways (port channels, rivers, lakes), turning basins and port basins of various terminals. The sea waterway must be adjusted to the navigation of specific types of ships, characterized by length, breadth, draft and airdraft. The primary requirement for shipping in sea waterways is the safety of navigation. Each sea waterway has traffic restrictions for the ships using it. These restrictions are called conditions of sea waterway operation or conditions of ship operation in the sea waterway. Problem: There are a number of empirical, deterministic or probabilistic methods to determine the safe width of maneuvering areas on port waterways. The direct application of empirical methods to determine the conditions for the safe operation of ships on the complex waterway, such as the Świnoujście–Szczecin fairway, was impossible due to the complexity of the waterway and various restrictions on its individual parts. Method: The paper presents the assumptions and calculation procedure of a method allowing for the determination of maximum safe parameters of ships in existing complex waterways. Results: The proposed method was used in the preparation of port regulations for the dredged and widened Świnoujście–Szczecin waterway. The results of these calculations are presented as a practical application of the method. Conclusions: This article defines conditions for the safe operation of ships in complex port waterways systems and presents the methodology for determining maximum safe parameters of ships in existing complex port waterways systems.

This paper discusses the application of resilience engineering principles by shipborne navigation systems. As a technological system, the ship navigation system comprises all the communication and navigation equipment required to operate a ship. If examined as a socio-technological system, one has to additionally consider the use of the ship navigation system by the bridge teams in order to perform the nautical profession in terms of safe and efficient ship navigation, taking into account environmental information received by communication. The first part of this work discusses the theoretical background of resilience engineering and situation awareness. Case studies are used to illustrate under which conditions the application of resilience principles may result in an improvement of the operational reliability. With the help of simulations, it is shown that a sub-optimal implementation and utilization of resilience principles may decrease the robustness of the technical ship navigation system, as well as the reliability and adaptability of the ship navigation system in use. The examples illustrate once again that monitoring is one of the four cornerstones of resilience: anticipating, monitoring, learning, and responding. This is due to the effectiveness of most resilience principles depending on the availability and trustworthiness of situational information in relation to system status and environmental conditions, irrespective of whether the generation and use of the situational information is machine-made or human-made. Therefore, the establishment of situation awareness is an essential accompanying functionality to be considered in design, operation, and use of resilient systems.

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology and unmanned surface vehicle (USV) technology, object detection and tracking have wide applications in marine monitoring and intelligent ships. However, object detection and tracking tasks on small sample datasets often face challenges due to insufficient sample data. In this paper, we propose a ship detection and tracking model with high accuracy based on a few training samples with supervised information based on the few-shot learning framework. The transfer learning strategy is designed, innovatively using an open dataset of vehicles on highways to improve object detection accuracy for inland ships. The Shuffle Attention mechanism and smaller anchor boxes are introduced in the object detection network to improve the detection accuracy of different targets in different scenes. Compared with existing methods, the proposed method is characterized by fast training speed and high accuracy with small datasets, achieving 84.9% (mAP@0.5) with only 585 training images.