Coordinating Vessel Traffic to Improve Safety and Efficiency

Global increase in trade leads to congestion of maritime traffic at the ports. This often leads to increased maritime incidents or near-miss situations. To improve maritime safety while maintaining efficiency, movement of vessels needs to be better coordinated. Our work formulates this problem of coordinating the paths of vessels as a multi-agent path-finding (MAPF) problem. To address this problem, we introduce an innovative application of MAPF in the maritime domain known as Vessel Coordination Module (VCM). Based on the local search paradigm, VCM plans on a joint state space updated using the Electronic Navigation Charts (ENC) and the paths of vessels. We introduce the notion of path quality that measures the number of positions on a vessel path that is too close to some other vessels spatially and temporally. VCM aims to improve the overall path quality of vessels by improving path quality of selected vessels. Experiments are conducted on the Singapore Straits to evaluate and compare performance of our proposed approach in heterogeneous maritime scenario. Our experiment results show that VCM can improve the overall path quality of the vessels.