Planned Route Based Negotiation for Collision Avoidance Between Vessels

Automatic vessel collision-avoidance systems have been studied in the fields of artificial intelligence and navigation for decades. And to facilitate automatic collision-avoidance decision-making in two-vessel-encounter situation, several expert and fuzzy expert systems have been developed. However, none of them can negotiate with each other as seafarers usually do when they intend to make a harmonious and more economic overall plan of collision avoidance in the COLREGS-COST-HIGH situations where collision avoidance following the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea(COLREGS) costs too much. A negotiation framework was put forward in our previous research to enable vessels to negotiate for optimizing collision avoidance in the COLREGS-COST-HIGH situations at open sea. In this paper, the negotiation framework is improved by considering the planned route of both vessels. The simulation results show that more economic overall plan of collision avoidance may be achieved by the improved framework when one or both parties deviate from their planed route or are approaching their next way points.