Toward an Online Decision Support System to Improve Collision Risk Assessment at Sea

Increasing ship speeds and unpredictable environmental perturbations raise the difficulty of situation awareness and collision avoidance—for instance, when maneuvering in narrow and busy surroundings. Providing decision support for these operations automatically and timely is, thus, of great concern in terms of ship safety. To achieve it, we developed an online decision support system (DSS) to provide navigators with intuitive and reliable solutions, such as for collision risk and the point of collision, in real time. More specifically, the collision risk for each target ship (TS) is colored coded, and the ship domain is marked by a heat map, which can remind the navigators of the surrounding situations intuitively. Afterward, a comparative case study with and without decision support was conducted to verify the effectiveness of the DSS during the busy water navigation process around a high-fidelity simulator. Experiment results show that the collision risk can be significantly reduced with the help of the proposed DSS. It has the potential to be used onboard as a complementary service in the near future.