AISFuser: Encoding Maritime Graphical Representations With Temporal Attribute Modeling for Vessel Trajectory Prediction

Abstract

Maritime transportation, vital for nearly 90% of global trade, necessitates precise vessel trajectory prediction for safety and efficiency. Although the Automatic Identification System (AIS) provides a comprehensive data source, how to model these multi-modal and heterogeneous time-varying sequences (such as vessels’ kinetic information and ocean weather factors) poses a formidable challenge. Moreover, most existing approaches are limited by the confined scope of vessel trajectory modeling, making it impossible to consider the unique characteristics of maritime transportation system. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel framework called AISFuser to i) encode unique maritime traffic network into graphical representations, and ii) introduce the heterogeneity into multi-modal temporal embeddings through Self-Supervised Learning (SSL). Specifically, our AISFuser is constructed by combining an attention-based graph block with a transformer network to encode information across space and time, respectively. In terms of temporal dimension, one SSL auxiliary task is also designed to enhance the heterogeneity of temporal representations and supplement the main vessel prediction task. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed AISFuser on a real-world AIS dataset. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method can forecast multiple attributes of vessel trajectory for over 10 hours into the future, outperforming competitive baselines.