Cloud edge enabled stacked ensemble learning framework with meta model for situation aware maritime traffic monitoring and control systems

In the last few years, the increasing trend of vessel density, different types of vessels, and the increased need for real-time data have made maritime traffic management significantly more difficult. This study presents a situation-aware framework based on stacked ensemble learning and cloud-edge hybridization, which is aimed at enhancing the maritime traffic monitoring and control systems. This approach combines stacked ensemble learning with a meta-model for vessel type classification and employs the concept of cloud-edge architecture to strike a balance between computational efficiency and delay minimization. While the edge layer takes care of real-time inference and situational analysis on the go, the cloud layer takes care of model training and amalgamation of data from various sources. Our evaluation made use of a comprehensive maritime vessel dataset and compared the performance with the state-of-the-art deep learning models (VGG16, VGG19, DenseNet121, and ResNet50). Our experiments show that the stacked ensemble learning with a meta-model significantly outperforms the traditional ones, achieving an overall accuracy of 0.98, macro average precision of 0.97, macro average recall of 0.98, and an F1-score of 0.98. Both ROC and PR curves also demonstrate excellent AUC values, which tend to 1.00 for almost all categories of vessels, which is a strong performance in distinguishing vessels from each other. Test predictions are outstandingly accurate, with confidence in vessel classification exceeding 99% in most cases. From these results, the proposed method shows robustness, scalability, and effectiveness for real-time maritime surveillance, naval defense systems, and autonomous vessel traffic control in industrial IoT environments.