The development of light detection and ranging (lidar) technology began in the 1960s, following the invention of the laser, which represents the central component of this system, integrating laser scanning with an inertial measurement unit (IMU) and Global Positioning System (GPS). Lidar technology is spreading to many different areas of application, from those in autonomous vehicles for road detection and object recognition, to those in the maritime sector, including object detection for autonomous navigation, monitoring ocean ecosystems, mapping coastal areas, and other diverse applications. This paper presents lidar system technology and reviews its application in the modern road transportation and maritime sector. Some of the better-known lidar systems for practical applications, on which current commercial models are based, are presented, and their advantages and disadvantages are described and analyzed. Moreover, current challenges and future trends of application are discussed. This paper also provides a systematic review of recent scientific research on the application of lidar system technology and the corresponding computational algorithms for data analysis, mainly focusing on deep learning algorithms, in the modern road transportation and maritime sector, based on an extensive analysis of the available scientific literature.

Due to the ever-increasing amount of data collected and the requirements for the rapid and reliable exchange of information across many interconnected communication devices, land-based communications networks are experiencing continuous progress and improvement of existing infrastructures. However, maritime communications are still characterized by slow communication speeds and limited communication capacity, despite a similar trend of increasing demand for information exchange. These limitations are particularly evident in digital data exchange, which is still limited to relatively slow and expensive narrowband satellite transmission. Furthermore, with the increasing digitalization of ships and introducing the sustainable concept of autonomous ship operation, large amounts of collected data need to be transmitted in real-time to enable remote voyage monitoring and control, putting additional pressure on the already strained means of maritime communications. In this paper, an adaptive shipboard data compression method based on differential binary encoding is proposed for real-time maritime data transmission. The proposed approach is verified on the actual data collected on board a training ship equipped with the latest data acquisition system. The obtained results show that the proposed data encoding method efficiently reduces the transmitted data size to an average of 3.4% of the original shipboard data, thus significantly reducing the required data transmission rate. Moreover, the proposed method outperforms several other tested competing methods for shipboard data encoding by up to 69.6% in terms of compression efficiency. Therefore, this study suggests that the proposed data compression approach can be a viable and efficient solution for transmitting large amounts of digital shipboard data in sustainable maritime real-time communications.

Traditional methods of marine navigation are undergoing a revolution brought about by the almost universal adoption of the Automatic Identification System (AIS). AIS exchanges a wealth of navigational information among vessels and between ships to shore through Very High Frequency (VHF). With AIS data integrated into the Electronic Chart Display and Information System (ECDIS), the identification and navigational information of surrounding vessels as well as aids to navigation can be reflected on the electronic charts in real time, despite some problems such as the low AIS carriage rate on small vessels where it is not mandatory and the high cost of ECDIS preventing such vessels from installing it. In this paper, we introduce BlueNavi, a lower cost but sustainable maritime information providing platform built with microservices architecture allowing flexible on-demand scalability and cross-platform adaptability. Applications served by BlueNavi can provide users with data either stored in a remote data center through the internet or received locally by devices connected to the station without the need for the internet. From our land test, we show that users with only an internet connection but without any AIS equipment can also obtain live AIS data collected by other stations. Conversely, with access to the internet, BlueNavi can also send data back to the land stations, enabling other ships to identify non-AIS ships as well. Through the live-ship test, we demonstrate that BlueNavi works well offline in cooperation with shipborne AIS equipment. We also look at some possible application scenarios for BlueNavi with other data sources and means of communication other than AIS and VHF that can be expanded to the platform. BlueNavi will enable inexpensive ship identification for small vessels and provide an extension of functionality to ECDIS for large ships.

The real-life signals captured by different measurement systems (such as modern maritime transport characterized by challenging and varying operating conditions) are often subject to various types of noise and other external factors in the data collection and transmission processes. Therefore, the filtering algorithms are required to reduce the noise level in measured signals, thus enabling more efficient extraction of useful information. This paper proposes a locally-adaptive filtering algorithm based on the radial basis function (RBF) kernel smoother with variable width. The kernel width is calculated using the asymmetrical combined-window relative intersection of confidence intervals (RICI) algorithm, whose parameters are adjusted by applying the particle swarm optimization (PSO) based procedure. The proposed RBF-RICI algorithm’s filtering performances are analyzed on several simulated, synthetic noisy signals, showing its efficiency in noise suppression and filtering error reduction. Moreover, compared to the competing filtering algorithms, the proposed algorithm provides better or competitive filtering performance in most considered test cases. Finally, the proposed algorithm is applied to the noisy measured maritime data, proving to be a possible solution for a successful practical application in data filtering in maritime transport and other sectors.

The purpose of this article is to propose a solution for the transport problem in sea freight using machine learning algorithms. An important aspect of sea transport is the organization of freight. In particular, the maritime freight network is a large complex system whose complexity of route maps and the variety of ship traffic render it difficult to model. When investigating the characteristics of the sea freight system, it is generally advisable to use rough models in which only significant approximations are introduced and a number of details are not taken into account. At the same time, an exact model is used in a detailed study of isolated areas of the network wherein it is the area which is explored in detail and not the connections between the said areas. By so doing, one should be careful not to overlook the deviations of the model from the real network in the first case and the connections between areas in the second.Building a model that accurately takes into account and describes all the details results in excessive complications in the design process, so, in practice, a number of assumptions are always used in the simulation which are basically approximations of the real characteristics related to ship movement, depending on the specific task. Four models are used in order to build an optimal cargo transportation system: Transnational cargo model; model of cargo transportation with a dedicated initial port of cargo departure; model of cargo transportation with dedicated initial ports of departure and final port of cargo distribution; model of cargo transportation on a circular chain of ports. The route conditions are given by the traveling wave equation and on the basis of these calculations the optimal route of cargo ship movement is put forth whereby conditions affecting freight traffic include: Number of ports, fuel quantity, port of cargo destination, as well as distances between ports and intermediate ports of call. The scientific contribution lies in the fact that the human role is reduced only to that of the system observer, which, in turn, simplifies the freight calculations, as well as helps reduce the cost of fuel and human resources.