AIS Management and Maintenance Center of China MSA was successfully integrated into the IALA-NET server in Denmark on April 30th, 2010, and followed by the test on AIS data exchange. Logging in to the data exchange server of China AIS Center (also acting as the Far East AIS Data Center internationally) or the AIS Center in Denmark, one can get access to the ships’ AIS data from those countries which participated in IALA-NET and realized data exchange with it, such as the United States, Canada, Korea, Denmark and some European countries. System integration enabled the search and retrieval of both static and dynamic data about ships of Chinese nationality navigating in the waters of above countries. Currently, the system runs stably and reliably as expected.
Proposed by IALA, IALA-NET is a near real time AIS data exchange service through the Internet. It is a worldwide service and is only open to national authorities who provide AIS data from their own country. The service is intended to improve and harmonize the navigation assistance means worldwide, and facilitate the safe and efficient movement of ships. China assumed the construction of Far East Center of IALA-NET Global Data Center.
Since October 2009, the AIS Center commenced dealing with the problems related to system integration, like coordination, software development and test. Under the instruction of China MSA, the Center solved a series of problems, such as the matching of data protocols during data exchange, initiation of connection request, data filtering and data safety, etc., through communication with AIS competent authorities abroad, and developed detailed data exchange plan. With all these efforts, the system was successfully connected with Denmark VPN and passed the data exchange test with Korea.
The integration with Danish AIS data server is totally in compliance with the IALA-NET pattern. After numerous equipment adjustment, China finally realized AIS data sharing with current IALA-NET on-line countries. For the first time, the web terminal of IALA-NET website showed information about ships navigating along Chinese coast, which doubled the quantity of on-line ships from 5,000 to 10,000.
The success of data exchange test indicated that China is ready for overall integration into IALA-NET. It is also valuable experience for the forthcoming formal data exchange, which contributes a lot to the final implementation of IALA-NET.