A Review of Artificial Neural Networks Applications in Maritime Industry

Artificial neural networks (ANN) are a data driven tool that has been used for modeling, prediction, optimization, classification, diagnostics, decision-making, etc., in various systems where measurements are available to produce significant amount of data. Ship processes are constantly monitored in order to control the operation of the ship and to ensure efficient and safe environment, generating large amount of data. Those data are increasingly being exploited by ANNs and the number of applications is growing. The aim of this paper is to analyze the applications of ANNs in maritime industry, and especially on ships. Based on the review analysis of the sixty-nine papers found published on this topic over the last 10 years in relevant databases, applications have been classified into eight categories in this paper. ANN types, training algorithms, activation functions, as well as measures used to evaluate the performance of the ANN models, have been analyzed for each application category. ANNs rely on data, therefore data acquisition, data processing, organization of the data for training ANN models, their validation and testing have also been addressed in this paper. The conclusions from the review analysis presented should be useful for future work in the area of ANN applications on ships and in maritime industry.