In his presentation at the last SMART4SEA Conference, Daniel Shirley, Product Marketing Manager, MarineTraffic, emphasized on the importance of always asking whether information is useful when assessing any new data source or technology.
We live in an age defined by data, whether that’s at work or home, whether you are awake, whether you are asleep, you are generating data. If you are e-mailing a colleague, a supplier, a customer, sending a WhatsApp message to a friend or loved one, or even getting a few more steps closer on your FitBit to that elusive 10,000 steps goal, you are generating data.
“The availability of alternative data and new quantitative techniques such as machine learning, are becoming a new source of competitive advantage”
Last year in a report by IBM, it was stated that 90% of all data in the world today was generated in the last two years. You can draw two things from that: One, obviously we are generating a lot more data at a much faster rate. Second, most people are going to relative novices at dealing with that much data. It’s a very complex arena to be working in. And because there is more and more data, more and more people are aware of the data, everyone’s talking about big data, hearing about big data, everybody’s boss wants to get a piece of the big data pie; thus it’s becoming more and more confusing to know what information you want, what data you want. Huge companies are putting massive value on the data. JP Morgan, in a recent report, stated that “the availability of alternative data and the new quantitative techniques for analyzing these data such as machine learning, are becoming a new source of competitive advantage”. Basically, if you are not in this game, you are gone.
Some shipping companies have already recognized this fact and technologists are already jumping on aboard. It’s no surprise; see the big names like The Port of Rotterdam and Maersk leading the way, with Maersk putting the pairing of data with their physical assets, as one of the most valuable ways to gain advantages in optimization.
Basically, if you want to be ahead, if you want to be in the game at all, you need data. But do you really need more data? Your ships are generating so much; the amount of sensors and data collection points on each new build is increasing again and again, so before you open that tap and bring more data into your organization, always have this question in mind: “Is the information useful?”. It’s very easy to get excited and overwhelmed by the new data sources, but always ask yourself this of the data itself: Is this useful to you? Is it useful to your business? Will this help you?
Let’s use an example from MarineTraffic. If I give you a vessel position as a dot on the map, is that useful to you? It’s not really, that’s not going to help anybody. If I give you a bit more information, if I tell you the name of the vessel the dot represents, the coordinates and when we received it; is that information useful? Unless you want to know where that vessel was at that point, it’s not very useful to you.
We can go a few steps further, we can tell where it departed from, what time it left and where it’s going and when it’s scheduled to arrive. A little bit more interesting, but if you are not interested in this vessel in particular, is it useful? Probably not. Then we can start learning more; we can say what time is due to arrive, at midday on a particular day.
Let’s say it is going to arrive at 5 o’clock on the 9th of February. When it arrives, it will have to wait 18 hours in anchorage, due to congestion in that port. Port operations will take between four to five hours; if port operations take more than three and half hours, then the vessel will be delayed leaving the port.
So, is that information useful to you as a port operator? As a logistician? As a supplier, in order to know when a vessel’s going to arrive? Is that information useful to you as a broker or a charterer, to understand the available capacity in the market? Consequently, whether that information is useful depends on your business, but always ask yourself that question.
The way to get to this level of detail is to understand the maritime ecosystem as a whole, not just one ship operation on its own, but looking everything as an interconnected system. Before you can do that, you have to understand operations at a more granular level. So, we take the data as whole and as aggregated data sets and then we start drilling down into them.
For example, if the vessel has declared that is going to Los Angeles and you know that it is clearly not, because it’s quite dry and there are not many places you can berth in the centre of Los Angeles, you need to make an assumption that it is likely going in the Long Beach area and you may start monitoring what’s happening. Then, based on the data, you can quickly get a better picture and understand what is happening. Beyond that, you can also see how the vessels operate in different areas, you can identify an anchorage and offshore terminals; based on what the vessel is transmitting and its observed behavior.
Therefore, once you start understanding this on a single port level, and on a single terminal level, and then applying similar algorithms across the globe, you start to understand everything as an ecosystem.
By monitoring vessel activity in a port, you may also understand which vessels are due to the port, which vessels are in port, the current speed of turnaround in port. You can start seeing and understanding the congestion on a global scale or on the port or terminal you are particularly interested in and you can start to make comparisons, to benchmark efficiency and ultimately to make a business decision. This is how we start looking vessel activity as global ecosystem and we are talking about disruption.
In all cases, the most important thing when anyone is trying to bring data into their business is to understand if it’s useful to you. The next steps are:
- Increased granularity – continuing to filter out the noise
- Interaction between the manned and autonomous ship
- Analytics benefitting the environment
- Action bartering – The progression of virtual booking
View Daniel Shirley’s presentation during the last SMART4SEA Conference at
The views presented hereabove are only those of the author and not necessarily those of SAFETY4SEA and are for information sharing and discussion purposes only.
Daniel Shirley, Product Marketing Manager, MarineTraffic 
With a background in sales, finance and data manipulation, I began my tenure with MarineTraffic as the Business Development Manager in 2014; fostering partnerships with industry leaders in the logistics, energy and manufacturing sectors. Stand out projects focussed on supply chain optimisation in the automotive sector, and enhancing situational awareness to improve safety in the marine environment. Building on this base, my role as Product Marketing manager sees him focussing on market analysis and product development in a wide range of areas. Currents projects see me involved in the creation of real-time analytic systems, designed to equip professionals with tools they need to make better-informed decisions.
