Quantitative Processing of Situation Awareness for Autonomous Ships Navigation

Abstract

The first ever attempt at fully autonomous dock-to-dock operation has been tested and demonstrated successfully at the end of 2018. The revolutionary shift is feared to have a negative impact on the safety of navigation and the getting of real-time situation awareness. Especially, the centralized context onboard could be changed to a distributed context. In navigation safety domain, monitoring, control, assessment of dangerous situations, support of operators of decision-making support system should be implemented in real time. In the context of autonomous ships, decision-making processes will play an important role under such ocean autonomy, therefore the same technologies should consist of adequate system intelligence. At the same time, situation awareness is the key element of the decision-making processes. Although there is substantial research on situation awareness measurement techniques, they are not suitable to directly execute quantitative processing for the situation awareness of autonomous ships navigation. Hence, a novel quantitative model of situation awareness is firstly proposed based on the system safety control structure of remotely controlled vessel. The data source is greatly limited, but the main result still indicates that the probability of operator lose adequate situation awareness of the autonomous ship is significantly higher than the conventional ship. Finally, the paper provides a probabilistic theory and model for high-level abstractions of situation awareness to guide future evaluation of the navigation safety of autonomous ships.

A Study of the Application Barriers to the Use of Autonomous Ships Posed by the Good Seamanship Requirement of COLREGs

“…In this context, autonomous ships are receiving extensive attention because they have the potential to reduce shipping costs and environmental impacts, improve health and safety for personnel working in the industry, and facilitate data collection and analysis processes. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence can also improve navigators' situation awareness, prediction capabilities and avoidance of encounters to reduce the risk of collision (Zhou et al, 2019). It may be considered that the industry is now at the dawn of an era of autonomous navigation, where the achievements of artificial intelligence technology made so far will find opportunities for a more comprehensive application.…”

On the Influence of Human Factors on Safety of Remotely-Controlled Merchant Vessels

“…As can be seen, one of the modes of operation is the above-mentioned remote control with or without seafarers' presence onboard. It is also expected that this type of MASS will be easier to implement than a fully autonomous one, for various reasons [10,11]. Among them is the issue of safety [12], often named as the most important aspect of the operation of any socio-technical system.…”

Situation Awareness Measurement in Remotely Controlled Cars

“…Many methods to measure SA range from self-rating scales to eye trackers (Zhou et al, 2019 ). SA measurement methods can be classified into three groups (Pew, 2008 ).…”