Real-time prediction of ship motions based on the reservoir computing model

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Real-time prediction of ship motions is crucial for ensuring the safety of offshore activities. In this study, we investigate the performance of the reservoir computing (RC) model in predicting the motions of a ship sailing in irregular waves, comparing it with the long short-term memory (LSTM), bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM), and gated recurrent unit (GRU) networks. The model tests are carried out in a towing tank to generate the datasets for training and testing the machine learning models. First, we explore the performance of machine learning models trained solely on motion data. It is found that the RC model outperforms the LSTM, BiLSTM, and GRU networks in both accuracy and efficiency for predicting ship motions. Besides, we investigate the performance of the RC model trained using the historical motion and wave elevation data. It is shown that, compared with the RC model trained solely on motion data, the RC model trained on the motion and wave elevation data can significantly improve the motion prediction accuracy. This study validates the effectiveness and efficiency of the RC model in ship motion prediction during sailing and highlights the utility of wave elevation data in enhancing the RC model’s prediction accuracy.