Simulation environment for the investigation of automatized cooperation of marine crafts

There are marine operations involving the cooperation of several marine crafts. For instance spill-over confinement, rescue, towing, etc. A simulation environment has been developed to analyse the cooperation problems that may arise along an operation, in order to develop procedures for better joint work of the ships. The final target is to add some automatization into the control of the ships, with on-board computers helping the ship captains to take the right decisions. The environment considers the ships as agents. The paper introduces the simulation environment and describes some examples concerning ship formation cases.