AIS Data-Driven Maritime Monitoring Based on Transformer: A Comprehensive Review
Zhiye Xie, Enmei Tu, Xianping Fu, Guoliang Yuan, Yi Han
TL;DR
The paper surveys Transformer-based AIS data-driven maritime monitoring across trajectory prediction, vessel behavior detection, and behavior prediction, outlining how Transformer models can capture long-range temporal dependencies in maritime sequences. It analyzes generative and classification trajectory approaches, discusses practical applications like risk assessment and traffic flow forecasting, and reviews energy-efficiency forecasting using Transformer variants. A high-quality public AIS dataset is collected and analyzed to reveal operation patterns across vessel types, providing data-driven insights for future work. Two key directions emerge: improving data quality and integrating multi-source data, with potential gains from hybrid models that combine graph representations with Transformer architectures to model inter-vessel interactions and complex maritime environments.
Abstract
With the increasing demands for safety, efficiency, and sustainability in global shipping, Automatic Identification System (AIS) data plays an increasingly important role in maritime monitoring. AIS data contains spatial-temporal variation patterns of vessels that hold significant research value in the marine domain. However, due to its massive scale, the full potential of AIS data has long remained untapped. With its powerful sequence modeling capabilities, particularly its ability to capture long-range dependencies and complex temporal dynamics, the Transformer model has emerged as an effective tool for processing AIS data. Therefore, this paper reviews the research on Transformer-based AIS data-driven maritime monitoring, providing a comprehensive overview of the current applications of Transformer models in the marine field. The focus is on Transformer-based trajectory prediction methods, behavior detection, and prediction techniques. Additionally, this paper collects and organizes publicly available AIS datasets from the reviewed papers, performing data filtering, cleaning, and statistical analysis. The statistical results reveal the operational characteristics of different vessel types, providing data support for further research on maritime monitoring tasks. Finally, we offer valuable suggestions for future research, identifying two promising research directions. Datasets are available at https://github.com/eyesofworld/Maritime-Monitoring.