Navigating the Future: A Novel PCA-Driven Layered Attention Approach for Vessel Trajectory Prediction with Encoder–Decoder Models

This study introduces a novel deep learning architecture for vessel trajectory prediction based on Automatic Identification System (AIS) data. The motivation stems from the increasing importance of maritime transport and the need for intelligent solutions to enhance safety and efficiency in congested waterways—particularly with respect to collision avoidance and real-time traffic management. Special emphasis is placed on river navigation scenarios that limit maneuverability with the demand of higher forecasting precision than open-sea navigation. To address these challenges, we propose a Principal Component Analysis (PCA)-driven layered attention mechanism integrated within an encoder–decoder model to reduce redundancy and enhance the representation of spatiotemporal features, allowing the layered attention modules to focus more effectively on salient positional and movement patterns across multiple time steps. This dual-level integration offers a deeper contextual understanding of vessel dynamics. A carefully designed evaluation framework with statistical hypothesis testing demonstrates the superiority of the proposed approach. The model achieved a mean positional error of 0.0171 nautical miles (SD: 0.0035), with a minimum error of 0.0006 nautical miles, outperforming existing benchmarks. These results confirm that our PCA-enhanced attention mechanism significantly reduces prediction errors, offering a promising pathway toward safer and smarter maritime navigation, particularly in traffic-critical riverine systems. While the current evaluation focuses on short-term horizons in a single river section, the methodology can be extended to complex environments such as congested ports or multi-ship interactions and to medium-term or long-term forecasting to further enhance operational applicability and generalizability.