Distributed model predictive control of inland ship platoon considering internal collision avoidance constraints

In recent years, ship platoon cooperative control issue has attracted much attention on account of its economic advantages especially in inland and short-sea waterways. To ensure the accuracy, stability and real-time control of inland ship platoon, this paper proposes a cooperative motion control method based on distributed model predictive control (DMPC) with internal collision avoidance constraint. On the basis of global information sharing, a centralized internal collision avoidance mechanism is designed, which can guarantee the safe distance between adjacent ships during the transient process of speed change with ship maneuverability constraints. A DMPC method for the platoon cooperative navigation is proposed with the Alternating Direction of Multipliers Method (ADMM) algorithm, to achieve efficient computing and high reliability. The stability of the proposed DMPC controller is analyzed to ensure the control errors can be converged with the collision avoidance constraints. The simulation experiments show that the proposed cooperative DMPC controller has satisfactory performance when applied to ship platoon in inland waterways.