Intelligent ship collision avoidance in maritime field: A bibliometric and systematic review

Abstract

With the increasing promotion of digital technology, safety issues faced by rush ships in the maritime industry have once again received attention. Ship collision avoidance (SCA) is not only a hot topic in the shipping industry but also an eye-catching issue in the development of intelligent ships. This paper provides a bibliometric and systematic overview of the literature on SCA to assist researchers in understanding the frontiers and recent trends of SCA. Based on the bibliographic portrait, a classification and grading study was conducted on the literature to provide a systematic review of it. A screening process was conducted on 851 relevant articles related to SCA and published in 2004–2023 in the Web of Science (WoS) database, and 526 highly relevant and high-quality papers were selected. Then, CiteSpace, VOSviewer software, and data visualization techniques were used to conduct a bibliographic portrait analysis on the selected papers. The evidence from these systematic literature reviews revealed the close collaboration relationships among researchers, research institutions, and countries or regions in the field of SCA studying shortly. Furthermore, the frontiers of the research on SCA were focused on three aspects, i.e. research subjects, technological methods, and novel algorithms in intelligent SCA. COLREG is a problem that must be considered in intelligent SCA. The future trends in intelligent SCA were explored and SCA technology was introduced from artificial intelligence (AI) so as to meet the safety requirement of maritime autonomous surface ships. AI algorithms such as machine learning and deep learning are key technologies for SCA. This research provides a theoretical basis and implementation directions of the research on SCA. The hybrid encounters between traditional ships and intelligent ships, as well as multi-ship encounters in narrow waterways, will be the focal points of attention in the future.