Enabling Future Maritime Traffic Management: A Decentralized Architecture for Sharing Data in the Maritime Domain

Digitalization is transforming the maritime sector, and the amount and variety of data generated is increasing rapidly. The true potential of data lies in its meaningful use to enable data-driven applications such as for highly-automated maritime systems or an efficient and secure traffic coordination. Data-driven applications usually rely on a heterogeneous data basis. The more context-related information is available, the better results the services can achieve. In practice, this poses an enormous challenge, as the heterogeneous data is not managed centrally by one single party, but is distributed across various actors. Therefore, a solution must be found for how distributed data can be used jointly and securely for the operation of maritime services without violating the sovereignty of the data providers. In this paper, a fully decentralized architecture is proposed to facilitate sovereign and secure data exchange between maritime actors, considering domain-specific challenges such as volatile connectivity, low bandwidth and the consideration of maritime standards. The approach is based on a data space architecture and demonstrates its functionality using a use case from maritime traffic management. It could be shown how the proposed architecture enables the acquisition of heterogeneous data from multiple providers and supports a safer and more efficient coordination of maritime traffic through the operation of a data-driven service.