Short-Term Drift Prediction of Multi-Functional Buoys in Inland Rivers Based on Deep Learning

The multi-functional buoy is an important facility for assisting the navigation of inland waterway ships. Therefore, real-time tracking of its position is an essential process to ensure the safety of ship navigation. Aiming at the problem of the low accuracy of multi-functional buoy drift prediction, an integrated deep learning model incorporating the attention mechanism and ResNet-GRU (RGA) to predict short-term drift values of buoys is proposed. The model has the strong feature expression capability of ResNet and the temporal memory capability of GRU, and the attention mechanism can capture important information adaptively, which can solve the nonlinear time series drift prediction problem well. In this paper, the data collected from multi-functional buoy #4 at Nantong anchorage No. 2 in the Yangtze River waters in China were studied as an example, and first linear interpolation was used for filling in missing values; then, input variables were selected based on Pearson correlation analysis, and finally, the model structure was designed for training and testing. The experimental results show that the mean square error, mean absolute error, root mean square error and mean percentage error of the RGA model on the test set are 5.113036, 1.609969, 2.261202 and 15.575886, respectively, which are significantly better than other models. This study provides a new idea for predicting the short-term drift of multi-functional buoys, which is helpful for their tracking and management.