Time-aware and feature similarity self-attention in vessel fuel consumption prediction

An accurate vessel fuel consumption prediction is essential for constructing a ship route network and vessel management, leading to efficient sailings. Besides, ship data from monitoring and sensing systems accelerate fuel consumption prediction research. However, the ship data consist of three properties: sequential, irregular time interval, and feature importance, making the predicting problem challenging. In this paper, we propose Time-aware Attention (TA) and Feature-similarity Attention (FA) applied to bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). TA acquires time importance by nonlinear function from irregular time intervals in each sequence and emphasizes data depending on the importance. FA emphasizes data based on similarities of features in the sequence by estimating feature importance with learnable parameters. Finally, we propose the ensemble model of TA and FA-based BiLSTM. The ensemble model, which consists of fully connected layers, is capable of simultaneously capturing different properties of ship data. The experimental results on ship data showed that the proposed model improves the performance in predicting fuel consumption. In addition to model performance, visualization results of attention maps and feature importance help to understand data properties and model characteristics.