A Study on the Construction of Stage Discrimination Model and Consecutive Waypoints Generation Method for Ship’s Automatic Avoiding Action

This article introduces an automatic collision avoidance (ACA) system for ship integrated by three parts, combining stage discrimination module, a module to determine feasible collision avoidance action according to International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREG) and a tracking module for keeping the own ship on the desired route. The paper attempts to discriminate the differently dangerous stages for encounters of ships by determining ship's domain model and analyzing COLREG. The new ship domain model defining the most dangerous area around target ship is shaped based on ship maneuverability information and good seamanship, within which statistical method is performed. one hundred commercial vessels and 60 experienced officers are surveyed in order to determine parameters employed for ship domain construction. The concept of ACA is adopted by mutually flexible application between PID controller and complexity rules of algorithm named consecutive waypoint generation (CWPG) algorithm. Many simulation scenarios are then, utilized to validate the effectiveness and feasibility of the suggested system accompanying with the evaluation on saving energy and smoothness of the performance. A novel ACA system is presented in this research the effectiveness of which is convincing. The new ship domain model can be widely applied in general cases instead of certain restriction areas implementing surveys in previous studies. There is no fulfilled acceptance solution to the major until now, however, new approaching development of this research will promote a positive result for an application of ACA system in deploy in the future.