Intelligent measurement of efficiency of port services for ships by using AIS data

The percentage of arriving ships to dock without waiting at anchorage（named as the rate of through docking） is picked as the criterion for measuring how well a port provides services for ships. A group of intelligent AIS processing algorithms is developed to conduct the measurement. The AIS data are examined against the ship database to find the related ship for each AIS track. The actions of a ship from arriving the port to departure from the port are completely mastered by referencing the geographic data of anchorages and berths. The movement of arriving ships is categorized as one of three types: coming to anchor and waiting for instructions, going to alongside dock without waiting, and going to the shipyard instead of a dick. The second type ships are picked up for calculation of the rate of through docking. This evaluation method is used to measure 5 typical container terminals for demonstrating the effectiveness of the method.