Evolutionary Sets Of Safe Ship Trajectories: A New Approach To Collision Avoidance

Abstract

The paper introduces a new method of solving multi-ship encounter situations for both open waters and restricted water regions. The method, called evolutionary sets of safe trajectories, combines some of the assumptions of game theory with evolutionary programming and aims to find optimal sets of safe trajectories of all ships involved in an encounter situation. In a two-ship encounter situation it enables the operator of an onboard collision-avoidance system to predict the most probable behaviour of a target and to plan the own manoeuvres in advance. In a multi-ship encounter the method may be used to help an operator of a VTS system to coordinate the manoeuvres of all ships. The paper contains a detailed description of collision-avoidance operators used by the evolutionary method and simulation examples of the method's results for digital maps.