Parallel Simulation Based Predictive Control Scheme With Application To Approaching Control For Automatic Berthing

This paper presents a parallel simulation based predictive control algorithm for automatic berthing. The proposed scheme uses many number of control sequences for on-line simulation of future behaviour of the ship movement. Each control sequence used in simulation generates a predicted sequence of the ship's future course. The predicted courses of the ship are evaluated based on some cost function suitable for control objective and then, the ‘optimal’ control signal is applied to the ship. To simulate the future behaviour of the ship, it is used a non-linear ship's dynamic model (called MMG model) and also the massively parallel computational hardware (called GPU: Graphical Processing Unit). Application of GPU for simulation (GPGPU) permits directly use of the nonlinear model of the ship for parallel simulation and makes the control algorithm with highly computational demand feasible. In order to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, computer simulations and actual sea tests are carried out using a training ship Shioji Maru. The experimental results show that the proposed method is successfully applied to the approaching control for automatic berthing.