PWPNet: A Deep Learning Framework for Real-Time Prediction of Significant Wave Height Distribution in a Port

Abstract

In this paper, a 2-stage cascaded deep learning framework, Port Wave Prediction Network (PWPNet), is proposed for real-time prediction of significant wave height (SWH) distribution in a port. The PWP-out model of the first stage, predicting port-entrance wave parameters, utilizes three branches, the first branch using a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) module to learn the temporal dependencies of time sequences of port-entrance wave parameters, the second branch using Wave and Wind field Feature Extraction (WWFE) modules, composed of a residual network with spatial and channel attention, to capture spatiotemporal characteristics of outside-port 2D wave and wind field data, the third branch using multi-scale time encoding to capture the periodic characteristics of waves and wind. The PWP-in model of the second stage, estimating the in-port SWH distribution, uses port-entrance wave parameters based on a customized Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and takes PWP-out’s output as its input. A comparison of the performance of PWP-out and mainstream machine learning models including LSTM, GRU, BPNN, SVR, ELM, and RF at Hambantota Port shows that PWP-out outperforms all other models regarding medium-term (25–48 h), med–long-term (49–72 h), and long-term (73–96 h) predictions, and ablation experiments proved the effectiveness of the three branches. Furthermore, the performance comparison of our PWPNet and other 2-stage models of LSTM, GRU, BPNN, SVR, ELM, and RF cascaded with PWP-in shows that PWPNet outperforms those cascaded models for medium-term to long-term predictions of SWH distribution in a port.