Measuring ship collision risk in a dense traffic environment

Abstract

Collision risk measurement is an essential topic for ship collision prevention. Many risk measures, i.e. DCPA/TCPA, etc., decouple the ship traffic into several pairs of ships and then evaluate the risk in each pair. This kind of measurement loses some information of the entire traffic and might include some biases in risk measurement, especially in multiple‐ship scenarios. In this article, Imminent Collision Risk Assessment (ICRA) is extended, which formulates collision risk as a ratio of reachable maneuvers leading to a collision and all reachable maneuvers (velocities). Two groups of scenarios have been simulated to show the ICRA is suitable for assessing the collision risk in multiple‐ship scenarios. Moreover, two improvements have been introduced: (1) a generalized velocity obstacle algorithm is introduced to collect the maneuvers leading to collisions, which considers ship dynamics; (2) the constraints of forces are considered in the formulation of reachable maneuvers. As a result, the proposed measurement helps one ship assess the risk of approaching obstacles which are difficult to avoid the collision in terms of own‐ship’s dynamics and kinetic constraints.