Digital moat: Detection of illegal passenger shipping

Municipality of Amsterdam

This algorithm falls under Digital moat. In 2020, the City of Amsterdam started developing reporting to detect illegal passenger shipping.

Last change on 6th of January 2025, at 12:59 (CET) | Publication Standard 1.0

• Publication category: Impactful algorithms
• Impact assessment: Field not filled in.
• Status: Out of use

General information

Theme

• Economy
• Space and Infrastructure
• Traffic

Begin date

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Contact information

[e-mail]

Responsible use

Goal and impact

Information-driven enforcement:

Four algorithms are being developed within the Digital Moat for information-driven enforcement. So far, fairway inspectors have not imposed sanctions based on these algorithms. The algorithms are not yet in use because they must first be assessed for legal and municipal requirements and applicability. A detailed description will be added to the register when the algorithms are put into use.

Detection of illegal passenger shipping:
In 2020, the municipality of Amsterdam started developing a report to detect illegal passenger shipping. In Amsterdam, passenger shipping is regulated by a permit. Vessels carrying passengers without a licence constitute unfair competition for licensed passenger vessels and are associated with nuisance on the water. The report provides a weekly overview of pleasure craft that regularly sailed the same route in the past week. This insight comes from the mandatory vignettes for pleasure craft. The passage of vessels with vignettes can be measured as vessels pass by at a short distance from a sensor. The algorithm consists of a calculation rule, which determines which vignettes sail the same round several days a week, more than once a day. The aim is to help fairway inspectors detect illegal pleasure craft by identifying hotspots and frequently used routes. Enforcement occurs only in the act and only by an authorised fairway inspector, there is no enforcement based on automatic decision-making or remote interventions.

Considerations

The Digital Canal:

The Digital Canal measures traffic on Amsterdam's inland waterways. The project started in 2019 under the Sailing programme. The Sailing programme falls within the Space and Economy cluster. For the project, sensors have been placed along the inland waterways in the city centre and the main waterways outside the centre of Amsterdam. By deploying these sensors, the municipality is developing a dynamic traffic model and tools for information-driven enforcement. This is done with the help of algorithms. The calculated traffic data is processed and presented in a digital overview (dashboard). The dashboard is accessible to policy advisers, nautical managers and waterway inspectors.

Within the Digital Moat, six algorithms are used: two for traffic monitoring (Pressure per lane and waterway traffic model) and four for information-driven enforcement (Detection of illegal passenger shipping, Reporting speeding passenger shipping, Detection of noise nuisance on the water and Reporting mooring use passenger shipping). Now the algorithm Detection illegal passenger navigation is described.

Human intervention

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Risk management

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Operations

Data

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