Framework Design for an Early Warning System to Prevent Ship Collisions

Ship collision is considered to be a high frequently marine accident, causing huge losses of material and goods. Less awareness of ship collision impacts and the human factor is the primary issue for ship collision accidents. Assorted efforts and tools have been developed, however, only limited ship collision prevention technique is applied for ship collision avoidance tools. The development of ship collision avoidance tools is demanded for decreasing ship collision accidents. This paper proposes an early warning system framework design to prevent ship collisions. The framework design for a ship collision’s early warning system started by gathering and interpreting ship position, speed, and heading data for both the own and target ship continuing by calculating the collision risk index using the fuzzy inference method. The concept of distance to closest point of approach and time to closest point of approach combined with the blocking area are used for the fuzzy inference parameters. Detailed steps of the framework design for the ship collision early warning system are provided. Numerical simulations considering head-on-head situation with different ship dimensions and speeds are presented to examine the framework design. The simulation results show that the framework design can identify the collision risk index that can be used for the early warning system parameter to prevent ship collision accidents.