Optimal control of ship collision avoidance problem

Abstract

The continuous increasing of maritime traffic amplified the severity of the collision risk issue in the maritime domain. Therefore, the calculus and optimization of ship’s navigation without collision risks have been known as a major challenge for the scientific researches’ community. Several solutions were proposed to enhance the maritime safety. The topic was covered as an optimal control problem with state constraints using Nonlinear Model Predictive Control in order to consider the nonlinearity of the ship motion. Other researches relied on calculating risks of collisions in ocean navigation by metaheuristic methods or by neural networks in order to cover multi-ship collision risk situation. In this paper, a detailed description of necessary elements used in the analysis of the maritime navigation without collision issue is presented including the ship motion, the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea COLREGs rules, and the navigation cost. An analytical study of optimal control based on Pontryagin’s Maximum Principle to avoid ship collision situation with more efficiency is proved and detailed. Simulation results that show the efficiency of the described method are calculated using MATLAB.