Decision Support System for Human-Machine Interactive Collision Avoidance at Sea

In recent years, Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS) have attracted numerous attentions in the shipping industry, which has become a cutting-edge technique. For a MASS, ship automatic collision avoidance (CA) is the fundamental function. Since the MASS still needs to be monitored and supervised by human operators before the system can be fully autonomous, it is crucial to develop a CA system that supports humans’ monitoring. However, most of the existing CA methods are of poor user-friendliness. In this paper, Decision Support System (DSS) based on Decision Disc (DD) is proposed to support CA in MASS, which is also user-friendly for human operators. The proposed DSS covers ship dynamics, irregular shape of obstacles, and consequences of each potential solution. Specifically, the decision space of the MASS is developed and visualized, showing the cost of each possible decision, and the MASS would pick up one optimal solution under the supervision of the human operators. Simulations are used to demonstrate the function of the proposed method, which shows its potential for reducing collision loss, facilitating ship decision-making, and helping human-machine interaction during collision avoidance for MASS.