Smart Maritime Transportation-Oriented Ship-Speed Prediction Modeling Using Generative Adversarial Networks and Long Short-Term Memory

Ship-speed prediction is an emerging research area in marine traffic safety and other related fields, occupying an important position with respect to these areas. At present, the effectiveness of techniques used in in time-series forecasting methods in ship-speed prediction is poor, and there are accumulated errors in long-term forecasting, which is limited in its processing of ship-speed information combined with multi-feature data input. To overcome this difficulty and further optimize the accuracy of ship-speed prediction, this research proposes a new deep learning framework to predict ship speed by combining GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) and LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory). First, the algorithm takes an LSTM network as the generating network and uses the LSTM to mine the spatiotemporal correlation between nodes. Secondly, the complementary characteristics linked between the generative network and the discriminant network are used to eliminate the cumulative error of a single neural network in the long-term prediction process and improve the prediction accuracy of the network in ship-speed determination. To conclude, the Generator–LSTM model advanced here is used for ship-speed prediction and compared with other models, utilizing identical AIS (automatic identification system) ship-speed information in the same scene. The findings indicate that the model demonstrates high accuracy in the typical error measurement index, which means that the model can reliably better predict the ship speed. The results of the study will assist maritime traffic participants in better taking precautions to prevent collisions and improve maritime traffic safety.