An Intelligent Agent-Based Resilient Framework for Marine Vessel Mission Adaptations

Waterborne transport is very important for moving freight and passengers globally. To make this transport more efficient, vessel design must adapt to changing missions, regulations and the occurrence of malfunctions. This paper presents the design of an intelligent decision-support framework to assist marine engineers and vessel operators in updating the system and control architecture of marine vessels before and during a mission. The connection between the system architecture and control design perspectives is enabled using a semantics-based technique. To this end, the multi-level vessel control system is described by a semantic database, a knowledge graph used to connect the components automatically, and quantitative service criteria. Considering the system architecture, the optimal modification is deduced using modularity and complexity criteria, originating from the field of network theory. On the control side, an intelligent automation supervisor is designed to make offline and online decisions regarding the energy deficit to execute a new mission and the active automation configuration during operation. For offline decisions, system architecture modifications are requested by the vessel designers to cover the energy deficit. During operation, switching between hardware and virtual sensors as well as switching between energy management controllers is implemented to handle the effects of sensor faults. The framework is successfully applied to a case study of a tugboat used to adapt to missions with different power requirements, while simulation results are used to indicate its application in supporting the decisions of vessel designers and human vessel operators.