Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Global Maritime Congress, İstanbul, Türkiye, 20 - 21 Mayıs 2024
Vessel Traffic Services (VTS) is a system regulating and planning maritime traffic by monitoring changing traffic conditions to enhance maritime safety and efficiency. It provides navigational assistance, traffic organization, and information services within boundaries established by the competent authority in critical areas. EMSA records indicate that almost 80% of marine incidents take place in inland, territorial, and internal seas that may be within the jurisdiction of the VTS area. In this regard, VTS operating in risky and congested waterways plays a critical role in ensuring maritime safety. Motivated by this, the purpose of this study is to provide a comprehensive summary of research conducted in maritime literature on VTS and to investigate the trends of these studies over the years. In this study, a bibliometric and scientometric analysis has been conducted. The search was performed in the Scopus database using keywords “TITLE-ABS-KEY ("vessel traffic service*") OR (TITLE-ABS-KEY (VTS) AND (maritime OR ship* OR marine OR pilot* OR captain* OR operator*))”. The search was limited to articles and conference papers published within the last 21 years. After excluding irrelevant studies, 484 were retained for analysis. The number of publications increased over time, from 3 in 2003 to 38 in 2023. The document types comprised 254 (52.5%) articles and 230 (47.5%) conference papers. China led with 124 publications, followed by South Korea (62), Poland (27), and Sweden (25). Türkiye ranked 14th with 14 publications. Despite being one of the top countries in terms of publications, South Korea showed a lower tendency for collaborative authorship with other countries. The Journal of Navigation had the highest number of publications. Five sources included the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering (12), Ocean Engineering (12), IOP Conference Series Earth and Environmental Science (9), Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering (8), and WMU Journal of Maritime Affairs (8). Ocean Engineering ranked 2nd overall in recent years, with 9 of its publications being authored by Chinese authors. Regarding institutions, Dalian Maritime University led with 41 publications. Istanbul Technical University ranked first among Turkish institutions with 8 publications. The analysis of keywords extracted from the abstracts revealed common terms such as "information", "data", "AI", "navigation", "safety", "port", "area", "radar", "operator", "risk", "analysis", "time", "communication", "algorithm", and "accident". Between 2004 and 2013, studies on collision, AIS, and radar were more prevalent compared to the period between 2014 and 2023. In terms of word combination, the following are listed respectively: "automatic identification system (217), collision avoidance (84), VTS operator (76), navigation safety (58), ship collision (53), ship trajectory (53), ship detection (52), radar station (44), human error (39)." Studies focusing on “vessel speed” intensified in 2023, while “machine learning” was not encountered in studies before 2017. Human error and VTS operator studies increased between 2019 and 2023, while collision avoidance and radar studies were more prevalent before 2018. Studies on autonomous ships began after 2014 and accelerated after 2019. This comprehensive analysis underscores the evolving focus within VTS research.