The ability to visualize maritime activity over time is an important tool for gaining a new level of understanding of the global flows of commodities, both from a historical trend perspective and a forward-looking perspective. By plotting Genscape Maritime data, powered by Genscape Vesseltracker™ on a map, one can easily visualize the frequently (or infrequently) traveled shipping routes, locations that are highly concentrated with maritime activity, and gain a visual understanding of the global flow of goods and commodities worldwide, a key part in the supply chain.
What is Vessel Density?
For commodity traders, who need a clear picture of major trade flows, congestions outside of ports, and approximate freight availability in different regions of the world, understanding vessel density is crucial.
Vessel density is the measure of how many ships are concentrated in a certain geographic area during a specific period of time. Genscape Maritime measures vessel density by collecting data from global vessels equipped with AIS transmitting beacons. With a private, proprietary terrestrial AIS antenna network, partner antenna networks, and partner satellite providers, Genscape has one of the most comprehensive databases of global ship positions available.
By plotting all the messages received with historical vessel tracks, a vast spider web of maritime activity emerges, providing insight into how and where global trade exists on a grand scale. When density is analyzed on a smaller scale, in shorter time durations or more specific geographic areas, even minor vessel route deviations or activities can indicate unusual behavior that can have significant impact on markets and prices.
What Can We See from a Vessel Density Analysis?
By plotting all AIS messages and vessel tracks, the world’s global fleet historical movement is captured over time, revealing many different behavioral patterns. The most obvious results from analyzing vessel density show the areas of the globe that are the most congested or most highly trafficked. Clear vessel track lines indicate well organized vessel “highways” such as in the English Channel.
Areas without distinct lines are more congested, and possibly dangerous as vessels move in more directions at once.
The density plots also reveal the most frequently traveled trade lanes, or port-to-port pairs. Highly active areas can show where vessels may congregate for ship-to-ship activities, such as bunkering activities, or anchorages. Finally, analysts can also find popular routes that may be illegal shortcuts to save time and money.
Why is Understanding Vessel Density Important?
One of the most obvious benefits to analyzing density plots is to determine the most likely routes vessels may travel, which is helpful in predicting things such as estimated times of arrival for shipments. Other interesting results from density analysis include finding patterns in the vessel tracks. These patterns can reveal floating storage, anchorages, and even bunkering activities. For example, in shorter duration density analysis, half-moon tracks or complete circles can show where vessels are at anchor, and for what periods of time.
Exploring all historical vessel tracks in smaller areas can also greatly assist in port planning, development, and safety. Similar to land-based vehicle traffic analysis, development of new terminals, dredging or coastline construction, much like the planning for new roads or traffic patterns, historical tracks must be taken into account to determine the effects of future congestion or safety.
If a vessel stays at anchor for a single tide, or multiple tides (12-hour or 24-hour, respectively) these tracks can identify when a vessel is actually stopped, even if the AIS transponder reports otherwise.
How is Genscape Utilizing Vessel Density?
Genscape Maritime has committed to providing the industry with the most complete, timely and insightful data possible for our customers. To that end, Genscape has invested heavily in expanding its privately-owned terrestrial antenna network to get as close as possible to the global fleet without setting foot on board. Data is only as good as what it can reveal, and Genscape is committed to investing in advanced analytics to take full advantage of the abundant, accurate data gathered within our networks.
Genscape utilizes machine learning, historical activity analysis, and density plotting to help identify expected and anomalous vessel behavior. Machine learning’s importance and application has expanded recently, as global data sets have continued to grow in size and understanding “big data” becomes more critical.
With 500 million messages processed every day, more than 98 percent of Genscape’s information originates from our privately-owned terrestrial AIS antenna network. To that end, Genscape utilizes this unique, large dataset to better identify vessel stops, delays and accurate vessel status. Activity analysis of all of this allows Genscape to create compelling products on top of raw AIS data, such as tracking global commodity movement and storage to a high degree of accuracy.
Operationally, this data can be used for route planning or forecasting, among other things. Outside of the obvious operational benefits, keeping a pulse on global vessel fleet activities can be an early indicator to industry trends.
On a vessel-by-vessel basis, Genscape can proactively provide notifications about ETA adjustments and delays that impact the downstream supply chain, and on a macro basis, the data helps support the industry’s most accurate waterborne commodity flow and bunkering reports.
Big data advancements make it possible to aggregate and process vast amounts of data. Density maps are a great statistical tool allowing users gain understanding, insights, and analysis more quickly, without having to run costly data processing on their side.
Genscape Maritime, powered by the industry-leading Vesseltracker AIS network, delivers exceptional transparency and insight into global vessel movements and activities, providing the market with an unrivaled understanding of the global commodity supply chain. Click here to learn more or request a free trial of Genscape Vesseltracker.