Cork student’s groundbreaking project can track and identify suspicious ships

A Cork teenager is being tipped for a national student innovation award for developing software capable of identifying suspicious vessels.

Seán Fitzgerald, from Courtmacsherry, a fourth-year student at St Brogan’s College, Bandon, has become a finalist in the senior category of the Student Enterprise Programme for his Fleet Monitor project.

A web-based maritime surveillance platform that uses AIS (automatic identification system) transponder data, it can predict the movements of ships that are hiding from conventional tracking systems.

Seán, 16, who is undertaking work experience at the National Maritime College of Ireland in Ringaskiddy, developed a system that could be the envy of military experts.

The platform cross-references live vessel positions in real time against official EU and Nato sanction lists to identify known or suspected shadow-fleet ships. Geographic layers map the world’s undersea fibre-optic cables, gas pipelines, and power interconnectors to give alerts when vessels behave suspiciously near sensitive assets. 

Zone-monitoring

The zone-monitoring system allows users to define areas of interest — such as Ireland’s EEZ (economic exclusion zone) or territorial waters — and receive on-screen, email, or SMS notification of ‘illegal’ vessels. The Fleet Monitor will include predictive tracking modules for vessels that ‘go dark’ — disabling, spoofing, or intermittently broadcasting their transponders — to evade detection. 

Using AI and custom algorithms, the system analyses the heading, speed, cargo type, class, routing pattern, and typical shipping-lane behaviour of a ‘dark vessel’ to estimate where it is most likely to be and heading.

As a result, an intelligence agency could be alerted weeks beforehand that a vessel of concern is expected to enter their territorial waters or EEZ. 

Sean says: “I came up with the idea when I saw an article about the shadow fleet operating near Ireland. I wondered if I can find any of these vessels. 

"It came as a shock when I looked on my ship-tracking app and discovered that there were eight shadow-fleet vessels operating around Ireland’s EEZ that were listed on Nato or EU sanctions lists. 

"So I took a look online to see if there was any website or app that tracked the shadow fleet globally. When I discovered none existed, I decided to see if I could build my own.”