A Decision Support System for Managing the Water Space

A novel decision support system comprising of several interference identification algorithms for the detection of hazardous (i.e., risk to life, assets, and/or mission) voyages and water space allocations in maritime operations is proposed. Given a specified spatio-temporal region for each polygonal or ellipsoidal object, the objective is to identify interference, defined as overlap, among the assigned regions. The challenge is to fuse information on bathymetry, obstacles, and planned spatial assignments to identify conflicts among any combination of polygons or ellipses. We briefly review data structures for the representation of spatio-temporal regions computationally, and efficient algorithms for collision detection. Specifically, we propose a two-phase solution approach to interference identification using time-parameterized R-trees, linear programming, and quadratic programming. The proposed interference detection algorithms can detect overlaps among thousands of polygons and elliptic regions. The resulting decision support tool, conflict identification, is part of a larger system for water space planning.