Abstract
Most causes of ships' collision accident are navigator's human error such as improper lookout, non-compliance with navigation rules and so on. Collisions set off not only losses of lives and properties but the environment pollutions. For safety of navigation, it is important to prevent these human errors. In assessing collision risks and making a plan for collision avoidance maneuver, officer of the watch predicts future movement of the encountered ships. Effective communication between encountered ships and the way for confirming both ships' intention are expected to improve navigation safety. Communication using VHF Radio is an effective way. Actually, VHF radio communication increases. Therefore communication still has problems in linguistic barriers and in misunderstanding messages from noisy VHF Radio. To clear the uncertainty of encountered ship's movement, we started a research on navigational intention exchange support system (NIESS) using AIS binary messages. In this research, prototypes of the NIESS and an AIS signal generator have been developed to assess feasibility of the NIESS. This paper presents the results of the user tests and discusses the feasibility of the NIESS.
