• Journal of Navigation and Port Research
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• v.47 no.6
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• pp.367-375
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• 2023

This study developed a new distance metric for vessel trajectories, applicable to marine traffic control services in the Korean coastal waters. The proposed metric is designed through the weighted summation of the traditional Hausdorff distance, which measures the similarity between spatiotemporal data and incorporates the differences in the average Speed Over Ground (SOG) and the variance in Course Over Ground (COG) between two trajectories. To validate the effectiveness of this new metric, a comparative analysis was conducted using the actual Automatic Identification System (AIS) trajectory data, in conjunction with an agglomerative clustering algorithm. Data visualizations were used to confirm that the results of trajectory clustering, with the new metric, reflect geographical distances and the distribution of vessel behavioral characteristics more accurately, than conventional metrics such as the Hausdorff distance and Dynamic Time Warping distance. Quantitatively, based on the Davies-Bouldin index, the clustering results were found to be superior or comparable and demonstrated exceptional efficiency in computational distance calculation.