Enhancing Maritime Trajectory Forecasting via H3 Index and Causal Language Modelling (CLM)

Predicting ship trajectories is an essential task for maritime stakeholders, encompassing economic, security, and logistical considerations. Accurate trajectory prediction plays a pivotal role in optimising shipping routes, ensuring maritime safety, and managing resources efficiently. However, this endeavour has posed several challenges due to the vast amount of trajectory data generated in real-time and the intricate interplay of spatial and temporal factors. Traditionally, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) [1] and Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) [2] networks have been employed to model sequential and temporal data, and many researchers have tried to adapt these recurrent neural network (RNN) architectures to the spatio-temporal domain. While these RNN-based approaches have demonstrated success in various applications [3, 4, 5, 6], they typically neglect the crucial spatial component inherent in ship trajectories, such as the geographical coordinates and the intricate relationships between waypoints in a trajectory.