Towards Safe Navigation by Formalizing Navigation Rules

One crucial aspect of safe navigation is to obey all navigation regulations applicable, in particular the collision regulations issued by the International Maritime Organization (IMO Colregs). Therefore, decision support systems for navigation need to respect Colregs and this feature should be verifiably correct. We tackle compliancy of navigation regulations from a perspective of software verification. One common approach is to use formal logic, but it requires to bridge a wide gap between navigation concepts and simple logic. We introduce a novel domain specification language based on a spatio‐temporal logic that allows us to overcome this gap. We are able to capture complex navigation concepts in an easily comprehensible representation that can directly be utilized by various bridge systems and that allows for software verification.