Multi-ship encounter situation adaptive understanding by individual navigation intention inference

Abstract

The multi-ship encounter situation at sea is characterized by high complexity and uncertainty, which is a big challenge for both traditional ships and the new autonomous ships. In order to make reasonable navigation decisions and perform well under multi-ship encounter situation, it is necessary to grasp the current scenario correctly and intelligently. Therefore, in this paper, an adaptive understanding model for multi-ship encounter situation is proposed. The core function of this model is to infer the navigation intention of other target ships under the same situation. This model is mainly composed of two sub-models. One is the ship encounter situation analysis model, which realizes the cognition of the whole encounter scenario from the global perspective by maintaining the “double matrix”. The second is the ship navigation intention inference model, the key part of the model is a set of well-designed fuzzy inference system. The output of the encounter situation analysis model is the input of the intention inference model, and these two models are closely linked to form a unified whole. This model is verified by both simulation-based and real scenario-based experiments, the results show that this model can perform well under the complex multi-ship encounter situation. Moreover, some necessary discussion and analysis for this inference model are also stated at the end of this paper, in the future, we expect that this model can be applied in real situations.