Node importance evaluation in marine traffic situation complex network for intelligent maritime supervision

Vessel Traffic Services (VTS) aims to improve the safety and efficiency of water transportation, yet its operation relies heavily on the work of Vessel Traffic Services Operators (VTSOs). Enhancing VTSO's situational awareness help improve VTS performance while relieving the workload of VTSOs. However, an effective method of analysing the water traffic from a systemic perspective to improve situational awareness among VTSOs is lacking. Therefore, we propose a method to evaluate the node importance of ships based on the marine traffic situation complex network (MTSCN) to enhance the situational awareness of VTSO. The node importance of ships reflects the conflicting risk and the complexity of the traffic structure. Several case studies were conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of applying this proposed method to promote the performance of VTS. The promising results show that the identification of key ships with high node importance can help VTSOs identify targeted ships in need of traffic service and control and determine the priority in which these targeted vessels are to be supervised. The application of this proposed method supports the construction of intelligent VTS to improve its efficiency and automation in controlling and serving water traffic.