Short-Term Prediction of Ship Roll Motion in Waves Based on Convolutional Neural Network

Abstract

In this study, a short-term prediction method for ship roll motion in waves based on convolutional neural network (CNN) is presented. Firstly, based on the ship roll motion equation, the data for free roll attenuation motion in still water, roll motion in regular waves, and roll motion excited by irregular waves are simulated, respectively. Secondly, the simulation data is normalized and preprocessed, and then the time-sliding window technique is applied to construct the training and testing sample sets. Thirdly, the CNN model is trained by learning from the constructed training sample sets, and the well-trained CNN model is applied to predict the roll motion. To validate the CNN model’s prediction accuracy and effectiveness, a comparison between the forecasted results and the simulation data is conducted. Meanwhile, the predicted results are also compared with that of the long-short-term memory (LSTM) neural network. The research results demonstrate that CNN can effectively achieve accurate prediction of ship roll motion in waves, and its prediction accuracy is the same as that of the LSTM neural network.