“PREParE SHIPS” for Automated Ship Passages by Modern Decision Support Tools by Exchanging Future Positions

Abstract

Misunderstanding the intentions of other vessels is one of the most common causes of ship collisions today. Such misunderstandings are particularly dangerous during navigation in restricted areas, such as fairways, port areas, and inland water ways, and may be exacerbated with the introduction of unmanned vessels. To ensure safe operations, the understanding of the intentions and future positions of manned and unmanned vessels, the PREParE SHIPS project is creating a system capable of determining a ship’s position with high accuracy, predicting its future positions, and communicating the current and future positions. The positioning sub-system combines the signals of Galileo and EGNOS, EGNSS and SBAS respectively, with land based RTK corrections, providing a positioning accuracy of centimetres. Furthermore, by taking advantage of Galileo’s authentication features, the positioning system provides enhanced security measures against spoofing attacks. The prediction sub-system will use a ship dynamic model and machine learning to predict the future positions of the ship and improve said predictions with time, while the communication sub-system will broadcast the prediction through VDES ship2ship and ship2shore. PREParE SHIPS will improve the navigation and handling of ships, through high accuracy positioning and dynamic predictions, as well as reduce the risk of ship collisions, through the communication of present and predicted future positions. PREParE SHIPS is expected to increase safety and efficiency significantly and will be the base of future autonomous operations and standardisations.