Relative ship positioning based on information fusion in the MITS

Marine Intelligent Transportation System (MITS) is a large-scale wireless sensor networks in which communications are frequent, so a mass of abundant information about shipping exists in it. The current ship positioning methods mostly consider how to fuse the information from the active integrated positioning system which is composed of GPS, SINS, TNS, and SMS and so on. As a result, the abundant information in the MITS can’t be effectively used. Additionally, GPS possesses the fallibility in the practical application and the insecurity in the control authority. So, for above problems a novel ship positioning algorithm based on information fusion and relative measurements is proposed in this paper, namely it uses the navigation information from other ships to improve the positioning estimate by information fusion technology. Compared with its active integrated positioning estimate, the proposed relative positioning algorithm has better position accuracy, higher stability and better fault-tolerance capability etc... The algorithm analysis and simulation example both show the validity and advantage of the proposed algorithm.