Estimating Vessel Travel Time Statistics for Inland Waterways with Automatic Identification System Data

A constrained fiscal environment has pushed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) in recent years towards an asset management paradigm that seeks objective and consistent performance measures for assessing navigation project performance, identifying risks to waterway system functionality, and gaining a better understanding of how operations and maintenance decisions translate into levels of service provided to the national marine transportation system. One emerging technology that is supporting these efforts is the Automatic Identification System (AIS), required for most commercial vessels operating in U.S. coastal waters and widely used voluntarily by vessels operating on the inland waterway system as well. Archived AIS vessel position reports can be mined to obtain robust statistical representations of waterway performance through time, as measured via quantities such as origin-destination travel times, average vessel speeds, and dwell times within congested port areas. In this paper, a methodology is presented for establishing baseline travel time statistics from archived AIS position reports for waterway segments within the inland river system. Established methods from traditional traffic engineering approaches to freeway performance monitoring are applied to marine vessels traveling through segments along the Lower Mississippi River. Specifically, link-based travel time statistics for individual segments of waterway are compared to the full origin-destination, path-based statistics. Though marine traffic along the inland river system lends itself in part to analysis via traditional traffic engineering methods, the operational logistics of inland river shipping (e.g. stopovers for staging barges, loading and unloading cargo, etc.) also create some fundamental differences in traffic patterns that require additional analysis and new metrics to accurately capture waterway level of service to marine transportation stakeholders. The methods presented here will help the USACE and vessel operators determine baseline travel times for inland shipping, provide valuable voyage planning information that can be broadcast to mariners through the River Information Services (RIS) and e-Navigation programs, and when coupled with a rolling archive of AIS position reports, provide a robust capability for monitoring and quantifying waterway performance going forward.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AW020 Inland Water Transportation.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • DiJoseph, Patricia Kathleen
  • Mitchell, Kenneth Ned
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 94th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2015-1-11 to 2015-1-15
• Date: 2015

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; Maps; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 14p
• Monograph Title: TRB 94th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Inland waterways; Inland waterways traffic; Level of service; Travel time
• Identifier Terms: River Information Services; U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
• Uncontrolled Terms: Automatic identification systems; e-Navigation; Ship operators; Voyage planning
• Geographic Terms: Lower Mississippi River
• Subject Areas: Marine Transportation; Planning and Forecasting; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01557055
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 15-5791
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Mar 16 2015 4:41PM