Dynamic calculation of ship exhaust emissions based on real-time AIS data

Abstract

The activity-based methodology is becoming an increasing way to calculate exhaust emissions from ships in a port. Existing studies make great effort to build and analyze ship emission inventory in a variety of ports by applying this method to historical ship trajectory data. This kind of static emission inventory however, cannot meet the needs of real-time ship emission monitoring. This article proposes a method of dynamic calculation of ship exhaust emissions based on real-time ship trajectory data. Firstly, real-time ship AIS messages are partitioned into continuous data blocks and go through a series of pre-processing operations, including trajectory extraction, association and interpolation. Ship activity parameters are then determined by database querying and regression analysis based on ship attributes. Subsequently, an improved activity-based methodology is employed to estimate exhaust emissions from ships in a distributed way. Based on the grid model, regional ship exhaust emissions can be statistically and dynamically calculated by the spatial allocation of all ship emissions. In a case study, a real-time monitoring platform for ship exhaust emissions in Shenzhen port is developed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.