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Fiscal constraints at the federal level drive the need for more robust and objective performance evaluation methodologies for use by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as it carries out its civil works mission in support of the nation's water resources infrastructure. One specific area of need concerns functional performance evaluation of dredged navigation channels at the local level as well as performance evaluation of systems of navigation projects. The nationwide automatic identification system (NAIS) for vessels that operate in coastal waters was instituted after the terrorist attacks of September 2001 and is maintained by the U.S. Coast Guard. The system constitutes an enabling technology to provide the data required for quantitative performance assessments of corps-maintained navigation infrastructure. In this paper, several applications are presented of archival NAIS data toward waterway performance evaluation. An assessment and comparison also are presented of several deep-draft coastal ports with respect to the sensitivity of vessel transit timing to tidal elevations. The NAIS data archive is applied toward a point-to-point transit time monitoring strategy at the local and regional levels. The corps confronts an uncertain fiscal outlook and constrained budgets for annual operations and maintenance activities. These metrics, as well as other potential applications of archival NAIS data, can play a valuable role in the provision of objective, quantitative assessments of waterway performance.

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