Automation Workflow for Catch Documentation Scheme (CDS) and IUU Compliance

Manual verification of vessel licenses, catch certificates, and area authorizations is slow and error-prone, leading to customs delays, demurrage fees, and six-figure fines for non-compliance. An automated workflow ingests and cross-references documents against IUU databases (e.g., Global Fishing Watch, EU IUU vessel list) in seconds, flagging discrepancies before shipment arrival. This prevents costly port holds, ensures smooth customs clearance, and protects against regulatory penalties that directly impact the bottom line.

Association with IUU fishing carries severe reputational damage, leading to lost contracts, consumer backlash, and de-listing by major retailers. An automated workflow creates an immutable, blockchain-anchored evidence log for every shipment, proving due diligence. This defensible audit trail allows you to confidently assure buyers and certify compliance with schemes like the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), turning compliance from a cost center into a marketable brand asset that supports premium positioning and protects long-term customer relationships.

Compliance teams spend weeks each month manually retrieving PDFs, transcribing data, and checking disparate lists. A custom agentic workflow automates document ingestion (OCR/LLMs), entity extraction (vessel ID, catch area, dates), and validation against geospatial databases and sanctions lists. This reallocates skilled staff from repetitive verification to higher-value exception analysis and supplier development, significantly lowering operational overhead and improving job satisfaction.

Qualifying new fishing suppliers or processors is a bottleneck, delaying sourcing opportunities. An automated workflow performs continuous background checks, monitoring vessel movements against reported catch areas and validating license renewals. This creates a dynamic supplier risk score, allowing procurement to make faster, more informed decisions. It shifts diligence from a periodic, project-based burden to a continuous, integrated process, enabling agile response to market opportunities without compromising compliance standards.

Reactive compliance leaves you vulnerable to sudden regulatory changes or supplier failures. A custom workflow architecture integrates real-time data feeds (AIS, regulatory updates) with your internal supplier database. This allows you to model the impact of a vessel being added to an IUU list or a new catch area restriction, identifying at-risk inventory and alternative sourcing options weeks in advance. It transforms compliance from a defensive checkpoint into a strategic intelligence function for supply chain resilience.

Manually adapting to new regional CDS requirements (e.g., UK, Japan, US) is prohibitively slow and expensive. A well-architected workflow uses configurable rule engines and pluggable validation agents. Adding a new jurisdiction becomes a matter of configuring new rule sets and data source connectors, not rebuilding the system. This future-proofs your operations, dramatically reducing the cost and time to enter new markets and ensuring consistent global compliance standards as your business scales.

This agent ingests unstructured documents—Catch Certificates, vessel licenses, bills of lading—via OCR and LLMs to extract key entities: vessel ID, IMO number, catch area (FAO zone), species, and weight. It validates document format against CDS templates and flags missing or inconsistent fields for human review, creating the structured data foundation for all downstream checks.

This specialized agent cross-references extracted catch areas and dates against the vessel's license permissions from flag-state and RFMO (Regional Fisheries Management Organization) databases via API. It performs a geospatial compliance check, flagging trips where reported zones fall outside licensed areas or within Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), a primary indicator of IUU risk.

The core risk-screening component. This agent queries multiple authoritative IUU vessel lists (EU, US NOAA, RFMOs), INTERPOL notices, and global sanctions registers. It performs fuzzy matching on vessel names and IDs, correlates ownership structures, and generates a consolidated risk score. High-risk matches are routed to a dedicated case queue with enriched evidence for investigators.

To create an immutable chain of custody, this agent logs every verification step, data source timestamp, and agent decision onto a permissioned blockchain or ledger (e.g., Hyperledger Fabric). It generates a cryptographically verifiable compliance certificate for each shipment, which can be shared with regulators and buyers. This agent also manages the audit trail API for internal and external auditors.

Manages the exception workflow. When any agent flags a discrepancy, potential IUU match, or data gap, this router creates a structured case in a system like ServiceNow or Jira. It enriches the case with all relevant documents, verification results, and suggested actions, then routes it to the appropriate compliance officer based on risk score and expertise. It tracks SLAs for review and integrates final decisions back into the ledger.

The workflow's central nervous system, built with an orchestrator like LangGraph or Temporal. It manages the stateful execution of the agent chain, handles retries and failures, and integrates with core enterprise systems: logging compliance status in SAP/ERP, updating shipment holds in the TMS, and pushing alerts to Slack/Teams. It provides dashboards for workflow health, throughput, and risk metrics, ensuring operational control.

The workflow's primary legal check. Agents must query official flag-state APIs (e.g., EU Fleet Register, NOAA's Vessel Monitoring System) and commercial maritime databases (IHS Markit, Lloyd's List) to validate vessel ID, license status, and authorized fishing areas. Integration requires handling API rate limits, parsing heterogeneous XML/JSON formats, and caching results to avoid latency in the verification chain.

Core risk mitigation layer. The system ingests and normalizes IUU blacklists from Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMOs like ICCAT, WCPFC), the EU IUU Regulation list, and national authorities. Agents perform fuzzy matching on vessel names, IMO numbers, and call signs against these lists. A separate process validates RFMO-issued Catch Documentation Scheme (CDS) certificates, checking digital signatures and certificate chain validity where available.

Provides the 'where' and 'when' for catch verification. The workflow ingests Automatic Identification System (AIS) data streams (commercial or satellite-based) and Vessel Monitoring System (VMS) data where accessible. Geospatial agents correlate declared catch areas and times with the vessel's historical track, flagging discrepancies where a vessel's position does not align with the reported fishing zone. This requires processing high-volume time-series data and applying maritime boundary polygons.

Connects compliance to physical operations. Agents extract lot numbers, shipment dates, and supplier details from ERP (SAP, Oracle) and Warehouse Management Systems. This data is linked to the physical catch documentation. For inbound shipments, the workflow triggers verification before goods receipt in the WMS, placing non-compliant lots on hold. Integration is typically via REST APIs or middleware (MuleSoft, Apache NiFi) to handle transactional updates.

Handles unstructured and semi-structured inputs. The workflow ingests scanned Catch Certificates, landing declarations, invoices, and Bills of Lading via email, portal, or EDI. A pipeline using OCR (Tesseract, Azure Form Recognizer) and LLM-based extraction agents (via LangChain, DSPy) parses key data entities: vessel name, catch date, species, weight, and FAO area. Extracted data is validated against master data and the results of other system checks.

Creates the defensible audit trail. Upon successful verification, the workflow packages all evidence—license checks, geospatial correlations, document hashes, and decision logic—into a cryptographically signed payload. This is written to an immutable ledger (e.g., a permissioned blockchain like Hyperledger Fabric or a ledger database). This provides regulators and auditors with a tamper-evident record of due diligence, which is critical for mitigating liability under IUU regulations.