Empirical analysis of complex network for marine traffic situation

With the increasing activities in waters, the maritime management departments have a strong demand on improving traffic service to enhance the safety of water transportation. Therefore, the quantitative expression of Marine Traffic Situation (MTS) has attracted numerous attention from numerous scholars. At present, there is no macro index to indicate the complexity of MTS. This work proposed the marine traffic complexity inspired by the theories of complex network and network dynamics. The ship was regarded as the vertex, the relationship between the ships is seen as the edge, and then the Marine Traffic Situation Complex Network (MTSCN) was established. Moreover, the topological characteristics such as degree, vertex strength, clustering coefficient and network structure entropy were used to statistically characterize the evolution of marine traffic system. The scenario analysis based on real traffic data was introduced to reveal the variation of MTS, where the scale-free characteristics and inhomogeneity of the MTSCN were found. The results show that the complex network can provide an intuitionistic and accessible metric to reflect the essence of marine traffic flow, which plays an important role in understanding the marine traffic system, managing and controlling the marine traffic safety in the future.