Physically Feasible Shipping Routes: A Density‐Weighted Graph Search Approach

ABSTRACT

Extracting topologically correct and kinematically feasible shipping routes from AIS data remains an open problem because existing methods formulate treating route extraction as a purely geometric fitting task and overlook the heavy‐tailed, density‐heterogeneous nature of maritime traffic. To address this gap, this study proposes a density‐weighted graph search framework that re‐formulates route extraction as least‐resistance pathfinding on a density‐weighted topology. The framework makes three contributions. (1) A navigable density field is constructed with a PowerNorm transformation to recover low‐frequency oceanic corridors hidden by long‐tail traffic distributions. (2) A tight‐to‐loose dynamic‐radius topology suppresses land‐crossing shortcuts while preserving global connectivity. (3) A heat‐adsorption cost function combined with cubic B‐spline smoothing and kinematic‐aware semantic waypoint extraction yields decision‐ready passage plans. Case studies on the Ningbo‐Singapore and Singapore‐Rotterdam corridors show that the framework achieves an RMSE of 4.8–5.2 km, a length ratio of 1.002 and a smoothness improvement of more than one order of magnitude over the baseline skeleton.