New PolyChord technology to improve prediction of destination and arrival times of commercial shipping vessels

SPRINT funding will enable PolyChord to collaborate with data science experts at the University of Southampton to progress the new DESTA technology that will better predict destination and arrival times of vessels carrying commercially valuable cargo.

Satellites are used to detect Automatic Identification System (AIS) signatures on ships when out of range of terrestrial networks, and information can be extracted to show unique identification, position, course, and speed. PolyChord will work with shipping and navigation experts from the University of Southampton to obtain more accurate information out of these data sets, and gain superior ETA and destination prediction. This can have a significant impact on the costs of goods as they move across the water and throughout the globe.

PolyChord’s innovative approach to the challenge of estimating the time of arrival is focused on using a more advanced kind of probabilistic inference than was previously available. The PolyChord Nested Sampling technology provides more accurate error bands for destination prediction.