DEVELOPMENT OF THE ‘INLAND SHIPPING MILEAGE INDEX’ USING AIS DATA FOR HINTERLAND TRANSPORT MONITORING

Abstract

Due to growing transport volumes that can no longer be handled by road and rail alone, and the environmental advantages of inland waterway transport (IWT), a modal shift to waterways can be expected. Traffic on German waterways is closely linked to the ARA-seaports of Antwerp (Belgium), Rotterdam (Netherlands) and Amsterdam (Netherlands), which are among the largest in the world. Understanding transport characteristics is vital for the growth of the IWT sector. Germany's main IWT transport statistics are in the annual traffic report by the Federal Waterways and Shipping Agency, based on 35 counting points. Some points provide details like vessel type, direction or load. Others only give the total number of vessels. This limits the report's ability to make specific statements. To close these gaps, the processing of data from the Automatic Identification System (AIS) will be presented, which enables more comprehensive findings on traffic to be computed. Artificial cross-sections from AIS data employed by this study are used to compare the passages of vessels with the 35 counting points from the traffic report. To enable comparison with the dominant mode of transport, road transport, the “truck toll mileage index” developed by the Federal Office for Goods Transport is applied to IWT and leads to the introduction of the “inland shipping mileage index”. Due to erroneous and incomplete AIS data, a systematic processing methodology is introduced. A strong correlation between the processed AIS data and the traffic reports has revealed the quality of the data and the effectiveness of the processing method. The daily mileage is an example of an application that shows weekly and seasonal patterns. Finally, the inland shipping mileage index enables a comparative analysis with road transport and provides a solid database for future challenges in the development of hinterland connections for the most important European seaports.