# Beyond the Next Port: A Multi-Task Transformer for Forecasting Future Voyage Segment Durations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08013 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08013/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Autoformer: Decomposition Transformers with Auto-Correlation for Long-Term Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13008/) (2021)
- [FEDformer: Frequency Enhanced Decomposed Transformer for Long-term Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12740/) (2022)
- [iTransformer: Inverted Transformers Are Effective for Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06625/) (2023)
- [ETA Prediction with Graph Neural Networks in Google Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11482/) (2021)
- [A Unified Replay-based Continuous Learning Framework for Spatio-Temporal Prediction on Streaming Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14999/) (2024)
- [Spatio-Temporal Few-Shot Learning via Diffusive Neural Network Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11922/) (2024)
- [Prediction of Vessel Arrival Time to Pilotage Area Using Multi-Data Fusion and Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09969/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate forecasts of segment-level sailing durations are fundamental to enhancing maritime schedule reliability and optimizing long-term port operations. However, conventional estimated time of arrival (ETA) models are primarily designed for the immediate next port of call and rely heavily on real-time automatic identification system (AIS) data, which is inherently unavailable for future voyage segments. To address this gap, the study reformulates future-port ETA prediction as a segment-level time-series forecasting problem. We develop a transformer-based architecture that integrates historical sailing durations, destination port congestion proxies, and static vessel descriptors. The proposed framework employs a causally masked attention mechanism to capture long-range temporal dependencies and a multi-task learning head to jointly predict segment sailing durations and port congestion states, leveraging shared latent signals to mitigate high uncertainty. Evaluation on a real-world global dataset from 2021 demonstrates the proposed model consistently outperforms a comprehensive suite of competitive baselines. The result shows a relative reduction of 4.70% in mean absolute error (MAE), 4.95% in mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) and 2.59% in root mean squared error (RMSE) compared with sequential deep learning models. The relative reductions compared with gradient boosting machines are 7.03% in MAE, 39.49% in MAPE and 4.37% in RMSE. The case study conducted on one major destination port further illustrates the model's superior accuracy.