Ship-motion prediction: algorithms and simulation results

Ship-motion prediction is very useful for several naval operations such as aircraft landing, cargo transfer, off-loading of small boats, and ship "mating" between a big transport ship and some small ships. The prediction information is extremely useful in sea states above 3. Five to ten seconds of ship motion prediction can give the operator ample time to avoid serious collisions. The paper summarizes the development of a high performance ship-motion prediction algorithm using minor component analysis (MCA). Simulation results show that this method can predict ship motion a long time ahead with consistent accuracy. That is, the prediction error is almost the same for the 5 second and 20 second predictions. Other conventional algorithms, such as neural networks (NN), autoregressive methods (AR), and Wiener prediction, were also studied for comparative purposes.