Development and application of a real-time early-warning system for ship navigation in the Yangtze River

This paper presents a real-time early-warning system for ship navigation in the Yangtze River. Shipping accidents are prone in the narrow waterways such as the Yangtze River. Therefore, this paper intends to develop a real-time early-warning system to promote the safety of waterborne transportation. This paper is divided into four parts: system design, system architecture, key technologies and application. The system is developed by Visual C++ and QT Creator, including S57 electronic river charts management, target ship management, black-spot water area early-warning, ship grounding early-warning and ship-bridge collision early-warning. This paper analyzes the influencing factors for navigational risk which are identified from the trajectory data of ship navigation and well represent the navigational risk in real-time. The scenario of ship passing through the Second N anjing Yangtze River Bridge is used to verify the developed system. The results show that the system can effectively assist the crews to make decisions before accident occur, make up for the lack of real-time risk warning and improve the safety of ship navigation.