
on Marine Navigation
and Safety of Sea Transportation
Number 2
175
1 BACKGROUND
Today, there are more and more base stations have
been developed to receive the real-time vessel in-
formation and to send them to VTS (Vessel Traffic
Service) where this information will be displayed on
ECDIS to facilitate traffic monitoring. And the in-
formation is very valuable in other area in shipping
industry such as ship agent, brokerage, pilotage, sal-
vation, custom inspection, quarantine, and fleet
monitoring, etc.
[1][2]
However, it is hard for these people access the
AIS information field.
[3]
To satisfy their demand,
several live AIS web system have been developed,
for example, Lloyds AISLive, NavCom AIS Live,
AISLivepool and Tokyo bay live traffic website. All
these systems, however, are only based on AIS in-
formation which is collected from shore based AIS
stations, and their coverage only within sea area A1.
We have developed a live AIS web system using
Ajax technology
[4][5]
. But this system can not track
vessels when they are beyond the coverage of shore-
based AIS stations, because the coverage of the VHF
frequency, which the AIS system works on, is nor-
mally within sea area A1. Therefore, in this paper
we integrate Inmarsat-C polling service and China
Beidou Navigation satellite system into the vessel
tracking system in order to extend coverage of the
system to sea area A3. Once the vessel leaves the sea
area A1, that means the position information broad-
casted by AIS system can not be received by the
shore-based AIS station, the vessel tracking system
can use Inmarsat-C polling services or China Beidou
navigation satellite system to tracking the vessel
continuously.
This paper is organized as follows: in section 2,
we briefly introduce the AIS system, Inmarsat-C
polling service and China Beidou navigation satellite
system; in section 3, we describe the architecture of
the vessel tracking system; in section 4 we give out
the running results and conclusions.
2 INTRODUCTION
2.1 The Automatic Identification System
The Automatic Identification System is an automat-
ed tracking system used on vessels and Vessel Traf-
fic Services (VTS) for identifying and locating ves-
An Integrated Vessel Tracking System by Using
AIS, Inmarsat and China Beidou Navigation
Satellite System
C. Yang, Q. Hu, X. Tu & J. Geng
Merchant Marine College, Shanghai Maritime University
ABSTRACT: As there are more and more Automatic Identification System (AIS) sets have been deployed
onboard, it is getting easier for people to trace vessels. Today, many online vessel monitoring services have
been developed; however, most of them are based on AIS information. Because the coverage limitation of
VHF frequency, which the AIS set works on, is normally no more than 25 nautical miles, so these systems
can not track vessels when they are beyond the coverage of the shore-based AIS station. In order to track ves-
sels in all sea areas, we developed a comprehensive vessel tracking system, namely ManyShips, which inte-
grates AIS, Inmarsat and China Beidou navigation satellite system. The running result of the system shows
that the Beidou satellite system can track vessels within Asian-Pacific region while the Inmarsat-C station
polling service can help people tracking vessels within sea area A3.