Design and Implementation of a Digitalised Marine Aids to Navigation Monitoring System for High‐Density Maritime Traffic Waters: A Case Study of the Strait of Malacca

Abstract

The Strait of Malacca is one of the world's busiest and most operationally demanding maritime corridors. Nevertheless, the monitoring of marine aids to navigation (AtoN) in high‐density maritime environments remains heavily dependent on periodic inspections and manual reporting, limiting continuous visibility of infrastructure conditions. This study presents the engineering design, large‐scale deployment and operational evaluation of the AtoN Remote Monitoring System (ARMS) for high‐density maritime traffic waters in Malaysia. The framework integrates asset‐level multi‐sensor instrumentation, local signal validation within purpose‐built ARMS enclosures, hybrid communication through the Automatic Identification System (AIS), very high frequency (VHF) radio and cellular networks, and the centralised shore‐based e‐Nav.my monitoring platform. The study contributes a replicable engineering framework for digitalised AtoN monitoring and provides quantitative evidence of system availability, communication reliability, alert performance and maintenance response. A 90‐day operational assessment was conducted across 478 ARMS‐equipped AtoN installations within a national inventory of 853 installations, comprising 3.4 million validated sensor records, 412 automated alerts and 183 associated maintenance actions. The measured monthly system availability was 98.3%, while the measured communication success rate was 98.7%. A probabilistic reliability model estimated a theoretical availability of 99.94% for the three‐channel communication architecture. Fault detection system achieves an average measured fault detection delay of only 8.4 min, an alarm accuracy rate of 93.9%, and a false alarm rate of 6.1%. The average time elapsed from alarm generation to fault repair is 14.2 h. These metrics are far superior to the 15‐to‐45‐day detection delay of traditional inspection methods. These findings demonstrate the operational feasibility of integrating distributed sensing, resilient communication and centralised digital monitoring to support condition‐aware management of geographically dispersed AtoN infrastructure.