Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) are used by ships and vessel-tracking services to provide real-time awareness of locations for safe navigation and routing and historical analysis, similar to what air-traffic control systems do for aircraft. The data services company exactEarth uses a constellation of satellites in space to collect more than 7 million AIS vessel-position reports per day. That number is expected to grow by an order of magnitude when 58 new satellite payloads come online soon.
To analyse this huge amount of data, exactEarth partnered with machine-learning and geospatial analytics firm CCRi to help evaluate the viability of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for managing and analyzing satellite-collected data more efficiently. Google Cloud Bigtable, Google Cloud Dataproc and GeoMesa are the main components in this solution for global geospatial analytics.