Research on Automatic Navigation System in Rough Sea (II)

Abstract

It is required for shipping companies to reduce the number of crews against high operation cost of ships. If high technology, super computer, remote sensing technique, new materials are fully applied to a ship for operating in the ocean, automatic ship operation without crews will be realized. For this purpose, it is necessary to plan the system which can make a ship avoid the danger automatically in rough seas, for example in typhoon. We focus our intention on the short time operation. In very rough seas, mission of the first priority is to keep crews and cargoes safe for avoiding the danger of ship. In this paper, two subjects are studied for the purpose. (1) The Automatic Rough Sea Avoidance System [ARSAS], which has two systems, works when the ship runs in rough sea. They are named "Judge system on dangerous degree" and "Operating system to auoid danger". In the former system, the dangerous degree on a ship is defined by the method with integrating many research results on seakeeping performance, which has proposed by the authors, and in the later system, the captain's knowledge about the operating performance of the ship and the data of weather condition are summarized. We propose the concept on the systems by making use of AI (Artificial Intelligence) procedure. (2) Exact information on environmental conditions becomes needed for an accuracy improvement of weather routing. An improvement of the prediction accuracy is hoped. However, an enormous cost is needed to raise prediction accuracy of information on environmental conditions. We make clear, with analytical method and simulation, the effects of the accuracy of typhoon information on the estimation accuracy of ship route, ship speed and fuel oil consumption etc.