UAIS — Understanding waterway behaviour
UAIS studies how vessel traffic behaves on waterways. We map traffic flows and patterns and study how they emerge and develop over time.
Vessels continuously transmit information about their position and movement. By recording and analysing this data over time, UAIS can study what happens on a waterway as a whole.
Not just where an individual vessel is, but how traffic flows change, where waiting times occur, how an area is used during an event, or which patterns develop over time.
UAIS follows four steps.
Current observations can be combined with historical data. This allows situations, locations and periods to be compared and developments to be studied over time.
Much of the information about how waterways are used is already present in vessel movements themselves. UAIS makes this information suitable for studying traffic behaviour and traffic flows.
The answers are already on the waterway. UAIS brings them to the surface.
UAIS stands for Understanding waterway behaviour. The name reflects what UAIS is about: not simply tracking vessels, but studying and understanding what their movements reveal about how waterways are used.
UAIS was developed by Sven Lens from the question of how existing vessel movement data can be used more effectively to study the behaviour and use of waterways.
