Short-term Inland Vessel Trajectory Prediction with Encoder-Decoder Models

Abstract: Accurate vessel trajectory prediction is necessary for save and efficient navigation. Deep learning-based prediction models, esp. encoder-decoders, are rarely applied to inland navigation specifically. Approaches from the maritime domain cannot directly be transferred to river navigation due to specific driving behavior influencing factors. Different encoder-decoder architectures, including a transformer encoder-decoder, are compared herein for predicting the next positions of inland vessels, given not only spatio-temporal information from AIS, but also river specific features. The results show that the reformulation of the regression task as classification problem and the inclusion of river specific features yield the lowest displacement errors. The standard LSTM encoder-decoder outperforms the transformer encoder-decoder for the data considered, but is computationally more expensive. In this study for the first time a transformer-based encoder-decoder model is applied to the problem of predicting the ship trajectory. Here, a feature vector using the river-specific context of navigation input parameters is established. Future studies can built on the proposed models, investigate the improvement of the computationally more efficient transformer, e.g. through further hyper-parameter optimization, and use additional river-specific information in the context representation to further increase prediction accuracy.