A GIS-Based Spatial-Temporal Autoregressive Model for Forecasting Marine Traffic Volume of a Shipping Network

Research on the forecasting of marine traffic flows can provide a basis for port planning, planning the water area layout, and ship navigation management and provides a practical background for sustainable development evaluation of shipping. Most of the traditional marine traffic volume forecasting studies focus on the variation of the traffic volume of a single port or section in time dimension and less research on traffic correlation of associated ports in shipping networks. To reveal the spatial-temporal autocorrelation characteristics of the shipping network and to establish a suitable space-time forecasting model for marine traffic volume, this paper uses the AIS data from 2011 to 2016 for the South China Sea to construct a regional shipping network. The adjacent discrimination rule based on network correlation is proposed, and the traffic demand between ports is estimated based on the gravity model. On this basis, STARMA (space-time autoregressive moving average) model was introduced for deducing the interaction between he traffic volumes of adjacent ports in shipping network. The experimental results show that (1) there is a significant positive correlation between time and space in the South China Sea shipping network, and this spatial-temporal correlation has the characteristics of time dynamics and spatial heterogeneity; (2) the forecasting accuracy of the marine traffic volume based on the spatial-temporal model is better than the traditional time-series-based forecasting model, and the spatial-temporal model can better portray the spatial-temporal autocorrelation of maritime traffic.