e-Navigation based cooperative collision avoidance at sea: The MTCAS approach

Recent accident statistics have shown a continuous increase in year to year serious and very serious accidents at sea. In the near future, higher traffic density is estimated, which may further contribute to this increase. Within the 3-year Project MTCAS, partners from industry and academia contribute to accident reduction by developing an e-Navigation based System for pro-active, predictive and cooperative collision avoidance. MTCAS is the abbreviation for Maritime Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System, which implies the basic idea of adopting the Airborne Collision Avoidance System (ACAS) implementation TCAS. However, MTCAS' operational principal aims at supporting the officer of the watch on a ship's navigational bridge in detecting and solving conflicts with other ships taking into consideration the prevailing circumstances of the environment and traffic but also include relevant rules and regulations, bathymetry, as well as Vessel Traffic Services (VTS). Different from TCAS, MTCAS does not automatically intervene in terms of issuing steering commands, but moreover supports seafarers in cooperatively finding safe and efficient trajectories, which is completely different - innovative - compared to the basic TCAS purpose. A comparing study between TCAS and MTCAS is performed and the outcomes are discussed in this paper.