EnvShip: A Unified Framework for Context-Aware and Cross-Region Vessel Trajectory Forecasting

Abstract:Accurate vessel trajectory forecasting is essential for maritime situational awareness, navigation safety, traffic management, and autonomous navigation. Public Automatic Identification System (AIS) archives have enabled extensive research in this area, yet results remain difficult to compare because existing studies use incompatible preprocessing pipelines, forecasting horizons, data splits, coordinate systems, contextual inputs, and evaluation settings. We present EnvShip, a unified multi-region framework for context-aware and cross-region vessel trajectory forecasting. EnvShip applies a fixed and reproducible pipeline to public AIS data from Denmark, the United States, Greece, and Norway, and defines two standardized forecasting tracks spanning short- and long-horizon settings. From large-scale processed data, we curate 330{,}000 short-term and 106{,}857 long-horizon samples through strict motion screening, vessel-category and difficulty stratification, redundancy control, and vessel-disjoint splits. Each sample is aligned with environmental and neighboring-vessel context, together with weather and sea-state variables where available. We evaluate representative methods under in-domain and cross-region protocols, with analyses across prediction difficulty, scene type, and random seeds. Results show that environmental context provides the largest gains in coastline-constrained scenes, whereas neighboring-vessel context primarily benefits interaction-rich cases. Multi-region training improves generalization in most settings but introduces negative transfer for some source combinations. EnvShip provides a common and reproducible testbed for vessel trajectory forecasting. Code and data are publicly available at this https URL.

Machine Learning (cs.LG)

I.2.6; I.2.8; I.6.1

arXiv:2606.15240 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2606.15240v2 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.15240 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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