A Review of the current Collision Regulations to accommodate Multiple Ship Situations and MASS

Abstract

The age of sailing ships and primitive tools has evolved into one of power-driven vessels with sophisticated equipment that can substitute the navigating navigator with a monitoring navigator or remove the human onboard. The technology exists but in order to embrace it to bring about safer seas, current legislation and practices need to be reviewed to provide comfort and clarity for dynamic transformation to take place. This paper provides a comprehensive study of the current collision regulations and humbly suggests some revisions to ensure safe intelligent navigation. Collision avoidance is not about a ship meeting another ship with the actions regulated. Realistically, the navigator is faced with a multitude of ships and situations where the risk of collision may exist with several vessels needing to take avoiding action or requiring to maintain course and speed as dictated by the current rules. SMART technology can provide speedy and reliable computed actions to assist the navigator, reducing human error or the widely differing actions that might be taken by individual humans. Ultimately, unmanned ships may be the future of shipping as eradicating human error is only possible if the human is removed. Collating measurable effective actions from reputed ship masters for a multitude of collision scenarios and programming them into an artificial intelligence system, will provide stable and predictable collision avoidance actions that can be shared on inclusive platforms with other ships in the vicinity. This removes the varied action of humans and synchronizes manned vessels with MASS providing accurate predictive movements and big data computation. It is timely that the current collision regulations are reviewed and complications addressed to render clarity and simplicity with MASS treated no different. As we harmonize technology and humans with a defined regulatory framework that embraces both, only then can the desired goals become a reality.