A Proactive Decision Support Method for Ship Collision Awareness Incorporating Ship Maneuvering

Journal article, 2025

This paper aims to enhance ship collision awareness by providing decision support in collision avoidance. To enable real-time computation in navigation, a Non-iterative Action Distance Determination Algorithm (NADDA) is developed. NADDA reduces the time complexity from O ( T log n ) to O ( T) by eliminating iterative processes, while maintaining the same space complexity as conventional bisection-based methods. This improvement significantly enhances computational efficiency, facilitating real-time applications. Based on NADDA, a robust and interpretable method for quantifying collision stages is developed by incorporating operational uncertainties, ship man-euverability, and the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGs), thereby providing proactive colli-sion avoidance timing. Simulation experiments and a historical collision accident validated the effectiveness of the proposed methods. The results demonstrate that NADDA reduces computa-tion time by up to 93.1% compared to existing bisection-based methods, and the proposed collision stages quantification method achieves higher accuracy due to the consideration of operational uncertainties. The proposed method exhibits strong robustness and can provide real-time decision support in multi-ship encounter scenarios involving up to four target ships.