STMGF-Net: A Spatiotemporal Multi-Graph Fusion Network for Vessel Trajectory Forecasting in Intelligent Maritime Navigation

Artificial intelligence and Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) play pivotal roles in intelligent maritime navigation for the modern maritime industry. Many artificial intelligence maritime applications based on AIS data have dramatically benefited traditional operations and managements in the field of maritime industry, and also provided state-of-the-art predictive analytics for vessel collisions and route optimization. However, the problem of modeling the interactions of vessels in complex waters still needs to be adequately addressed. In this paper, we focus on using spatiotemporal AIS data to model and forecast multiple vessel trajectories amid dynamic interaction patterns, and we propose a forecast model based on a novel neural network, namely a spatiotemporal multi-graph fusion network (STMGF-Net). The innovative STMGF-Net comprises three crucial modules. First, a Spatiotemporal graph construction module generates interaction graphs of various navigation modes, such as motions, risks, and attributes of vessels, Second, a multi-mode fusion module embeds and fuses the above interaction graphs into STMGF-Net. Finally, squeeze-and-excitation and temporal convolutional networks are introduced as Squeeze-and-excitation temporal convolutional modules to enhance the overall efficiency of the model significantly. Overall, the STMGF-Net can recognize complex spatiotemporal interaction patterns among neighboring vessels so as to capture and integrate these interaction features for achieving high-precision prediction performance in intelligent maritime navigation. In numerical experiments, three water areas of Zhoushan Islands, Yangshan Waters, and Yangtze River Waters are used as training and testing datasets. The results show that STMGF-Net improved prediction errors of average and final distance with increase of 49.637% and 50.622% than classic and state-of-art graph neural networks.