Abstract: Accurate and reliable short-term prediction of ship motions offers improvements in both safety and control quality in ship motion sensitive maritime operations. Inspired by the satisfactory nonlinear learning capability of a support vector regression (SVR) model and the strong non-stationary processing ability of empirical mode decomposition (EMD), this paper develops a hybrid autoregressive (AR)-EMD-SVR model for the short-term forecast of nonlinear and non-stationary ship motion. The proposed hybrid model is designed by coupling the SVR model with an AR-EMD technique, which employs an AR model in ends extension. In addition to the AR-EMD-SVR model, the linear AR model, non-linear SVR model, and hybrid EMD-AR model are also studied for comparison by using ship motion time series obtained from model testing in a towing tank. Prediction results suggest that the non-stationary difficulty in the SVR model is overcome by using the AR-EMD technique, and better predictions are obtained by the proposed AR-EMD-SVR model than other models.

Key words: Nonlinear and non-stationary ship motion, Short-term prediction, Empirical mode decomposition (EMD), Support vector regression (SVR) model, Autoregressive (AR) model

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