Ontology-based fuzzy support agent for ship steering control

The important field of research on ship operation is related to the high efficiency of transportation, the convenience of maneuvering ships, and the safety of navigation. This paper proposes an ontology-based fuzzy support agent for ship steering control and desires to testify the validity of the proposal by applying the fuzzy control model to the steering control system based on linguistic instruction. The fuzzy support agent is presented to build the maneuvering models of steersman and the miniature model for steering control system. The proposed fuzzy agent contains three main mechanisms, including the interpretation mechanism of linguistic instruction, the self-regulation mechanism, and the task performance mechanism. Furthermore, the task performance mechanism includes the kinematics module and the performance ontology. The simulation results show that the proposed approach can work effectively for ship steering control. 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.