Distributed coordination for collision avoidance of multiple ships considering ship maneuverability

Over the past two decades, a number of methods have been proposed for solving maritime collision avoidance problems. Most of these works take a single ship's perspective and focus on one-to-one or one-to-many situations. To more complicated many-to-many situations, less attention has been paid. To deal with the many-to-many collision avoidance problem, this paper proposes a distributed coordination strategy which consists of two phases: firstly, predictions of ship trajectories are made based on ship dynamics, giving different candidate rudder angles, and potential collision risks that may be caused by each rudder angle selection are evaluated based on calculations of collision risk parameters; secondly, an optimization strategy is adopted to find the most efficient collision avoidance plan for the ships, namely, the rudder angles that each ship should take, and the corresponding operation time for rudder steering, with the overall objective to minimize the sum of time that each ship spends in avoiding collisions with the other ships. Simulation experiments are carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, as well as the corresponding communication and computation costs.