Traffic Pattern Mining and Forecasting Technologies in Maritime Traffic Service Networks: A Comprehensive Survey

Maritime traffic service networks and information systems play a vital role in maritime traffic safety management. The data collected from the maritime traffic networks are essential for the perception of traffic dynamics and predictive traffic regulation. This paper is devoted to surveying the key processing components in maritime traffic networks. Specifically, the latest progress on maritime traffic data mining technologies for maritime traffic pattern extraction and the recent effort on vessels' motion forecasting for better situation awareness are reviewed. Through the review, we highlight that the traffic pattern knowledge presents valued insights for wide-spectrum domain application purposes, and serves as a prerequisite for the knowledge based forecasting techniques that are growing in popularity. The development of maritime traffic research in pattern mining and traffic forecasting reviewed in this paper affirms the importance of advanced maritime traffic studies and the great potential in maritime traffic safety and intelligence enhancement to accommodate the implementation of the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence technologies, and knowledge engineering and big data computing solution.