Enrich your performance with three new enhancements to Vessel Insights API

Maximizing your fleet’s performance and profitability is essential to your success. So is fulfilling your reporting obligations, like IMO DCS and EU MRV — not to mention the new CII regulations and the proposed inclusion of shipping in carbon emission trading systems. Accurate, reliable information is key to managing these and other challenges, helping to set your course for future growth. Improvements to Vessel Insights API enhance your ability to achieve these goals.

Read on to learn more about the new capabilities, designed to support all your optimization needs through a single API endpoint.

 

1. The ability to insert noon reports

This new feature is an API endpoint for users to insert noon reports.

Our users — particularly those from larger shipping companies, systems integrators, and SaaS platform providers — are digitally-savvy and have noon reports on their platforms. However, until now, they could only insert noon reports into the DTN product ecosystem using email, which had limitations.

We listened to customer and created the endpoint. After a one-time setup, you can enjoy a seamless flow of information in your DTN product suite. During its thorough testing, we received positive user feedback on this feature, and we can’t wait to roll it out to the rest of our customer base and the industry.

 

2. Automatic noon report handling

Vessel Insights API now also improves how you handle different noon report flows. This is important as noon reports are often:

  • Delayed
  • Updated
  • Out of sequence

That can make it tricky to insert noon reports and build up a sequence of events for your audits. For example, you could get a delayed noon report that says your ship is sailing after an up-to-date report that says you’ve already docked in port.

To help, this feature handles noon reports in different timeframes and sequences for you. It will make your life easier as you administrate your vessels and look for operational improvements.

 

3. Normalized AIS data

Soon after we launched Vessel Insights API in July 2022, we discovered some of the software’s calculations using a vessel’s AIS tracks produced less-than-ideal results. We rolled up our sleeves and quickly found this issue was primarily due to the nature of AIS data itself.

AIS tracks contain position data at irregular time intervals, and these time intervals can be quite small. The position data’s accuracy also depends on the GPS’s accuracy and the number of values available after the decimal in the latitude and longitude fields. To maintain a 10-meter accuracy, we need to keep four digits after the decimal, which is often not the case for position reported in AIS data. Combining small time intervals with inaccurate position data can yield strange speed and distance results.

After discussions with the DTN data science team, plus our customers and partners, we concluded that normalized AIS track data was necessary. And now, through the new enhancements, your vessels will have a latitude and longitude value every 15 minutes.

Normalized track from DTN vs. Raw track from provider
Examples of how the new DTN normalized track compares to the previous data.

This consistent flow of data eliminates spikes and calculation errors. Integrating normalized data into your use cases is also easier. We do the heavy lifting, so you can get the results you need faster.

 

Smarter, data-driven decisions

With these three improvements to Vessel Insights API, larger shipping companies and system integrators can make better data-driven decisions backed by new layers of intelligence.

The benefits include:

  • Accurate, reliable reports – you can process noon report data and automate quality checks.
  • A fuller data lake – combine operational data, advanced digital vessel profiles, high-definition track information, and hindcast weather data — for a bigger picture that support better decisions.
  • Enhanced weather-benchmarking – integrate accurate, high-quality weather data to support advanced analytics that drive decisions around environmental impacts and the new CII regulations.

 

The DTN advantage

Vessel Insights API from DTN simplifies the complex processes, serving data via a flexible GraphQL API, incorporating the company’s leading proprietary weather data and information from third-party providers.

It helps you solve the challenges you face right now: compliance with new emissions-related regulations while maximizing your performance and profits. With detailed, continuously updated, and quality-checked data to support your decision-making process, DTN empowers you to make the most of your maritime assets.

 

The intelligent choice

See how Vessel Insights API can fuel your fleet operations now and in the future.