AIS data from ships is excellent for analyzing single-ship movements and monitoring all ships within a specific area. However, the AIS data needs to be cleaned, processed, and stored before being usable. This paper presents a system consisting of an efficient and modular ETL process for loading AIS data, as well as a distributed spatial data warehouse storing the trajectories of ships. To efficiently analyze a large set of ships, a raster approach to querying the AIS data is proposed. A spatially partitioned data warehouse with a granularized cell representation and heatmap presentation is designed, developed, and evaluated. Currently the data warehouse stores ~312 million kilometers of ship trajectories and more than +8 billion rows in the largest table. It is found that searching the cell representation is faster than searching the trajectory representation. Further, we show that the spatially divided shards enable a consistently good scale-up for both cell and heatmap analytics in large areas, ranging between 354% to 1164% with a 5x increase in workers
@article{arxiv.2601.13795,
title = {A Distributed Spatial Data Warehouse for AIS Data (DIPAAL)},
author = {Alex S. Klitgaard and Lau E. Josefsen and Mikael V. Mikkelsen and Kristian Torp},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.13795},
year = {2026}
}