Data-Driven Operational Assessment Method and Digital Twin System for Unmanned Surface Vehicles
Article Information
Abstract
To address the challenge of effectively leveraging multi-source data for automated operational assessment of Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) and utilizing digital technologies for monitoring and control, this paper proposes a data-driven state assessment method for surface unmanned systems and develops a digital twin system tailored for USVs. First, a dual-channel feature modeling mechanism is constructed by integrating physically interpretable statistical features with temporal convolutional features. Second, a complementary modeling strategy is adopted using CatBoost for static classification and GRU for dynamic modeling, while a Covariance Intersection (CI) fusion strategy is introduced to enhance the classification performance and adaptability of the model. Finally, a digital twin system is designed that incorporates Position Estimation, Attitude Estimation, and State Evaluation, enabling real-time monitoring and multidimensional visualization of USV operational states. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms baseline approaches in terms of accuracy, F1-score, and other key metrics, exhibiting strong generalization capability and promising potential for practical deployment.
Graphical Abstract
Keywords
Data Availability Statement
Funding
Conflicts of Interest
Ethical Approval and Consent to Participate
References
- Zhao, F., & Wang, S. (2025). A hybrid framework integrating end-to-end deep learning with Bayesian inference for maritime navigation risk prediction. Journal of Marine Science and Engineering, 13(10), 1925.
[CrossRef] [Google Scholar] - Xu, P. F., Han, C. B., Cheng, H. X., Cheng, C., & Ge, T. (2022). A physics-informed neural network for the prediction of unmanned surface vehicle dynamics. Journal of Marine Science and Engineering, 10(2), 148.
[CrossRef] [Google Scholar] - Zhang, B. C., Wang, J. D., Gao, S., Yin, X. J., & Gao, Z. (2023). Health Status Evaluation of Welding Robots Based on the Evidential Reasoning Rule. Electronics, 12(8), 1755.
[CrossRef] [Google Scholar] - Chen, J., Zhao, Y., Wu, C., & Xu, Q. (2020). Data-driven health assessment in flight control system. Applied Sciences, 10(23), 8370.
[CrossRef] [Google Scholar] - Qiao, Z., Pan, X., He, Y., Jiangnan, Z., Yu, H., & Geng, C. (2024). A Study Examining the Adverse Effects of Electromagnetic Pulse on System-Level Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Their Subsequent Damage Assessment and Mitigation Strategies. Iran. J. Chem. Chem. Eng.(IJCCE), 43(11), 4185-4199.
[Google Scholar] - Wei, L., Sun, Y., Diao, Q., Xu, H., Tan, X., & Fan, Y. (2024). State of health estimation of lithium-ion batteries based on stacked-LSTM transfer learning with Bayesian optimization and multiple features. IEEE Sensors Journal.
[CrossRef] [Google Scholar] - Xiao, X., & Guo, J. (2023). A novel switchgear state assessment framework based on improved fuzzy C-means clustering method with deep belief network. Frontiers in Energy Research, 11, 1335184.
[CrossRef] [Google Scholar] - Ren, C., & Xu, Y. (2019). Transfer learning-based power system online dynamic security assessment: Using one model to assess many unlearned faults. IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, 35(1), 821-824.
[CrossRef] [Google Scholar] - Zhang, B., Chen, D., Su, W., Liu, T., & Shao, Y. (2024). Aviation fuel pump health state assessment based on evidential reasoning and random forests. Electronics Letters, 60(9), e13195.
[CrossRef] [Google Scholar] - Qu, S., Men, X., Liu, M., Cui, J., Wu, H., & Fu, Y. (2025). Navigation Attitude Prediction for Unmanned Surface Vessels in Wave Environments Using Improved Unscented Kalman Filter and Digital Twin Model. Journal of Marine Science and Engineering, 13(5), 932.
[CrossRef] [Google Scholar] - Zhang, B., Wang, S., & Ji, S. (2024). A deep learning combined prediction model for prediction of ship motion attitude in real conditions. Ships and Offshore Structures, 19(11), 1868-1883.
[CrossRef] [Google Scholar] - Wang, Y., Lu, X. R., & Chen, Y. (2024). Premonition-driven deep learning model for short-term ship violent roll motion prediction based on the hull attitude premonition mechanism. Applied Ocean Research, 146, 103970.
[CrossRef] [Google Scholar] - Cao, L., Qin, Y., Pan, Y., & Liang, H. (2024). Prescribed performance-based optimal formation control for USVs with position constraints and yaw angle time-varying partial constraints. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.
[CrossRef] [Google Scholar] - van der Saag, J., Trevisan, E., Falkena, W., & Alonso-Mora, J. (2025). Active Disturbance Rejection Control for Trajectory Tracking of a Seagoing USV: Design, Simulation, and Field Experiments. arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.21265.
[Google Scholar] - Huang, M., Li, X., Li, Z., Zhang, D., & Chen, Y. (2025). Uncertainty-aware deep distributed reinforcement learning for autonomous navigation of unmanned surface vehicles in complex environments. Ocean Engineering, 342, 122899.
[CrossRef] [Google Scholar] - Elsanhoury, M., Koljonen, J., Prol, F. S., Elmusrati, M., & Kuusniemi, H. (2024, December). Resilient Navigation in GNSS-Denied Conditions Using Novel LEO-Based Fusion Positioning. In 2024 IEEE International Conference on Wireless for Space and Extreme Environments (WiSEE) (pp. 118-123). IEEE.
[CrossRef] [Google Scholar] - Saptoe, J., van Aardt, S., Smith, F., & Hatefi, S. (2025). Unmanned surface vehicle with deep learning-based obstacle avoidance for water quality monitoring. In MATEC Web of Conferences (Vol. 417, p. 10002). EDP Sciences.
[CrossRef] [Google Scholar] - Cen, J., Li, J., Liu, X., Chen, J., Li, H., Huang, W., ... & Ke, S. (2024). A hybrid prediction model of vessel trajectory based on attention mechanism and CNN-GRU. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part M: Journal of Engineering for the Maritime Environment, 238(4), 809-823.
[CrossRef] [Google Scholar] - Liu, W., Xu, B., & Li, J. (2025). Data-Driven Carbon Emission Dynamics Under Ship In-Port Congestion. Journal of Marine Science and Engineering, 13(4), 812.
[CrossRef] [Google Scholar] - Hasan, A., Widyotriatmo, A., Fagerhaug, E., & Osen, O. (2023). Predictive digital twins for autonomous surface vessels. Ocean engineering, 288, 116046.
[CrossRef] [Google Scholar] - Raza, M., Prokopova, H., Huseynzade, S., Azimi, S., & Lafond, S. (2022). Towards integrated digital-twins: An application framework for autonomous maritime surface vessel development. Journal of Marine Science and Engineering, 10(10), 1469.
[CrossRef] [Google Scholar] - Peng, Z., Yue, Y., Zhu, X., Huang, M., Wong, P., Yao, S., ... & Hou, D. (2023, December). Digital twin applications in unmanned surface vehicles: A survey. In 2023 6th International Conference on Software Engineering and Computer Science (CSECS) (pp. 1-8). IEEE.
[CrossRef] [Google Scholar] - Madusanka, N. S., Fan, Y., Ahmed, F., Yang, S., & Xiang, X. (2023, October). Development of an Autonomous Pilotage for a Digital Twin-based Unmanned Surface Vessel in Virtual Reality. In National Technical Seminar on Unmanned System Technology (pp. 145-166). Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore.
[CrossRef] [Google Scholar] - Vasconcellos, E. C., Sampaio, R. M., Araújo, A. P., Clua, E. W. G., Preux, P., Guerra, R., ... & Sanchez-Pi, N. (2024). Reinforcement-learning robotic sailboats: simulator and preliminary results. arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.03337.
[Google Scholar] - Cho, K., Van Merriënboer, B., Bahdanau, D., & Bengio, Y. (2014). On the properties of neural machine translation: Encoder-decoder approaches. arXiv preprint arXiv:1409.1259.
[Google Scholar] - Prokhorenkova, L., Gusev, G., Vorobev, A., Dorogush, A. V., & Gulin, A. (2018, December). CatBoost: unbiased boosting with categorical features. In Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (pp. 6639-6649).
[Google Scholar] - Gorishniy, Y., Rubachev, I., Khrulkov, V., & Babenko, A. (2021). Revisiting deep learning models for tabular data. Advances in neural information processing systems, 34, 18932-18943.
[Google Scholar] - Julier, S. J., & Uhlmann, J. K. (1997, June). A non-divergent estimation algorithm in the presence of unknown correlations. In Proceedings of the 1997 American Control Conference (Cat. No. 97CH36041) (Vol. 4, pp. 2369-2373). IEEE.
[CrossRef] [Google Scholar]
Cited By (3)
-
Gaurav Dhiman, Kiran Deep Singh, Prabh Deep Singh, Norah Saleh Alghamdi, Ghadah Shukri Albakri. A novel approach to reliable and flexible distributed computing with virtualization in smart healthcare applications.
Scientific Reports, 2026 , 16 (1).
[CrossRef] -
Shubhani Aggarwal, Arzoo Miglani, Norah Saleh Alghamdi, Gaurav Dhiman. Resilient and decentralized demand-side management in smart grids using blockchain.
Scientific Reports, 2026 , 16 (1).
[CrossRef] -
İlknur Dönmez, Faruk Bulut. Multidimensional Diversity In Video Recommender Systems: A Holistic Framework of Literature Gaps and Future Directions.
Intelligent Systems with Applications, 2026 .
[CrossRef]
Cite This Article
TY - JOUR AU - Bai, Yuting AU - Hu, Jiyuan AU - Tursun, Eziz AU - Yimit, Hurxida PY - 2026 DA - 2026/01/08 TI - Data-Driven Operational Assessment Method and Digital Twin System for Unmanned Surface Vehicles JO - ICCK Transactions on Machine Intelligence T2 - ICCK Transactions on Machine Intelligence JF - ICCK Transactions on Machine Intelligence VL - 2 IS - 1 SP - 38 EP - 52 DO - 10.62762/TMI.2025.444910 UR - https://www.icck.org/article/abs/TMI.2025.444910 KW - unmanned surface vehicles KW - data-driven KW - state evaluation KW - digital twin KW - multi-source temporal modeling KW - model fusion AB - To address the challenge of effectively leveraging multi-source data for automated operational assessment of Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) and utilizing digital technologies for monitoring and control, this paper proposes a data-driven state assessment method for surface unmanned systems and develops a digital twin system tailored for USVs. First, a dual-channel feature modeling mechanism is constructed by integrating physically interpretable statistical features with temporal convolutional features. Second, a complementary modeling strategy is adopted using CatBoost for static classification and GRU for dynamic modeling, while a Covariance Intersection (CI) fusion strategy is introduced to enhance the classification performance and adaptability of the model. Finally, a digital twin system is designed that incorporates Position Estimation, Attitude Estimation, and State Evaluation, enabling real-time monitoring and multidimensional visualization of USV operational states. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms baseline approaches in terms of accuracy, F1-score, and other key metrics, exhibiting strong generalization capability and promising potential for practical deployment. SN - 3068-7403 PB - Institute of Central Computation and Knowledge LA - English ER -
@article{Bai2026DataDriven,
author = {Yuting Bai and Jiyuan Hu and Eziz Tursun and Hurxida Yimit},
title = {Data-Driven Operational Assessment Method and Digital Twin System for Unmanned Surface Vehicles},
journal = {ICCK Transactions on Machine Intelligence},
year = {2026},
volume = {2},
number = {1},
pages = {38-52},
doi = {10.62762/TMI.2025.444910},
url = {https://www.icck.org/article/abs/TMI.2025.444910},
abstract = {To address the challenge of effectively leveraging multi-source data for automated operational assessment of Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) and utilizing digital technologies for monitoring and control, this paper proposes a data-driven state assessment method for surface unmanned systems and develops a digital twin system tailored for USVs. First, a dual-channel feature modeling mechanism is constructed by integrating physically interpretable statistical features with temporal convolutional features. Second, a complementary modeling strategy is adopted using CatBoost for static classification and GRU for dynamic modeling, while a Covariance Intersection (CI) fusion strategy is introduced to enhance the classification performance and adaptability of the model. Finally, a digital twin system is designed that incorporates Position Estimation, Attitude Estimation, and State Evaluation, enabling real-time monitoring and multidimensional visualization of USV operational states. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms baseline approaches in terms of accuracy, F1-score, and other key metrics, exhibiting strong generalization capability and promising potential for practical deployment.},
keywords = {unmanned surface vehicles, data-driven, state evaluation, digital twin, multi-source temporal modeling, model fusion},
issn = {3068-7403},
publisher = {Institute of Central Computation and Knowledge}
}
Publisher's Note
ICCK stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and Permissions
Portico