Vessel Trajectory Prediction for Enhanced Maritime Navigation Safety: A Novel Hybrid Methodology

The accurate prediction of vessel trajectory is of crucial importance in order to improve navigational efficiency, optimize routes, enhance the effectiveness of search and rescue operations at sea, and ensure maritime safety. However, the spatial interaction among vessels can have a certain impact on the prediction accuracy of the models. To overcome such a problem in predicting the vessel trajectory, this research proposes a novel hybrid methodology incorporating the graph attention network (GAT) and long short-term memory network (LSTM). The proposed GAT-LSTM model can comprehensively consider spatio-temporal features in the prediction process, which is expected to significantly improve the accuracy and robustness of the trajectory prediction. The Automatic Identification System (AIS) data from the surrounding waters of Xiamen Port is collected and utilized as the empirical case for model validation. The experimental results demonstrate that the GAT-LSTM model outperforms the best baseline model in terms of the reduction on the average displacement error and final displacement error, which are 44.52% and 56.20%, respectively. These improvements will translate into more accurate vessel trajectories, helping to minimize route deviations and improve the accuracy of collision avoidance systems, so that this research can effectively provide support for warning about potential collisions and reducing the risk of maritime accidents.