R&D project: Detection, prediction, and solutions for safe operations of MASS
acronym: ENDURE
Agreement No: NOR/POLNOR/ENDURE/0019/2019-00
The project is financed from the Norway Grants programme
Abstract
Autonomous shipping of the future is gathering a lot of interest and attention in numerous countries. This development is governed to a large extent by recent advancements in technology. However, there exist numerous concerns and open issues, for example pertaining to the safety of prospective autonomous ships and shipping in general. In order to avoid an accident, it needs to be detected early enough, leaving a sufficient amount of time for the assessment of the situation and action. To this end appropriate, knowledge-based criteria are indispensable; however these are missing at the moment. Therefore in the herein project we attempt to address the issue of assessment and evaluation of the operational safety criteria belonging to the fields of 1) collision and grounding avoidance; 2) avoidance of stability incidents that are mainly related to the ship dynamics. For this purpose the following state-of-the-art modelling tools are used: 6-degree of freedom (DoF) ship motion model, encounters simulator, collision avoidance model. All these are complemented with the experts’ knowledge. To develop the criteria for safe collision and hard grounding avoidance maneuver, a concept of CADCA is adopted (Collision Avoidance Dynamic Critical Area). Therein, safe maneuvering area for collision and grounding encounters is developed for a wide set of situations with the use of 6 DoF ship motion model and encounter simulator. The safety criteria for dynamic stability of the vessel refer to a predefined set of stability failure modes. Thus, the conditions leading to excessive roll motions within short-time horizon can be obtained providing the control algorithms that exploit real time measurements of the ship motions in order to provide information on the immediate need for course and speed alteration. Subsequently the criteria are implemented within the safe path planning algorithm. Finally, the anticipated effects of the new developments on the risk of accident is measured.