Evolutionary Hierarchical Agent Decision Support System For Marine Traffic Coordination

This paper focuses on presenting the principals and early research on a modification of the Evolutionary Planner/Navigator (EP/N) system, that will introduce an agent system, that based on a hierarchy established with the help of AIS and radar, also incorporating COLREGs rules will be presenting a coordinated traffic plan for all ships in the analysed environment. The idea of this concept will be presented along with its requirements and research already undertaken. The new ahEP/N will maintain all of the benefits of the original algorithm (such as near real time work) and will allow the coordination of safe and economic path planning between all the ships in the area overseen by the watchkeeper.