Abstract:The trajectory of the inland waterway ship is important and useful in analysing the features of 16 the ship behaviour and simulating traffic flows. In the proposed research, a method is designed to restore 17 the trajectory of an inland waterway ship based on the Automatic Identification System (AIS) data. Firstly, 18 three rules are developed to identify and remove the inaccurate data, based on the reception range of the 19 received AIS data and the manoeuvring characteristics of the inland waterway ship. Secondly, the method 20 of restoring the full trajectory incorporating navigational features of the inland waterway ship is proposed 21 to model the ship trajectory. The trajectory is characterised by three types (line, curve and arc) and five 22 steps (line, curve, arc, curve and line) during the turning section. In order to validate the proposed method, 23 the AIS data of two inland waterway ships collected from three AIS-base-stations is selected for the 24 analysis, all inaccurate AIS data is identified and removed by the use of three cleansing rules. The results 25show that the three developed rules can effectively identify the inaccurate AIS data. The AIS data collected 26 by an AIS-shipboard-unit is then used to: (1) restore the ship trajectory, and (2) to restore the full trajectory in an effective manner by using AIS data. 33