A new deterministic approach in a decision support system for ship's trajectory planning

The paper introduces a Decision Support System for ships, developed to solve a problem of collision avoidance with static and dynamic obstacles. The system maps the decision making capability of a human (navigation) expert to solve the path planning problem for a ship in a complex navigation environment. It can be further developed to provide automatic control of a ship. It utilizes a new, fast and effective, deterministic method, called the Trajectory Base Algorithm, to calculate a safe, optimal path for a ship. The system structure, a detailed explanation of a new method, followed by results of simulation tests are all presented in the paper. The results proof a successful application of the method to solve a path planning problem for ships with the consideration of both static and dynamic obstacles in the environment, marine traffic regulations and dynamic properties of a ship, what makes this approach applicable in commercial systems. The approach can also be adapted for application in mobile robots path planning. The experimental results and ability of the system to achieve a new functionality of full autonomy show significance of this contribution to the development of Expert and Intelligent Systems domain. The author believes that autonomous systems constitute the future of Expert and Intelligent Systems.