Prediction of Vessel Trajectories from AIS Data Via Sequence-To-Sequence Recurrent Neural Networks

In this paper, we address the problem of predicting vessel trajectories based on Automatic Identification System (AIS) data. The goal is to learn the predictive distribution of maritime traffic patterns using historical data during the training phase, in order to be able to forecast future target trajectory samples online on the basis of both the extracted knowledge and the available observation sequence. We explore neural sequence-to-sequence models based on the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) encoder-decoder architecture to effectively capture long-term temporal dependencies of sequential AIS data and increase the overall predictive power. The experimental evaluation on a real-world AIS dataset demonstrates the effectiveness of sequence-to-sequence recurrent neural networks (RNNs) for vessel trajectory prediction and shows their potential benefits compared to model-based methods.