Collision avoidance is a priority task for ensuring the safety of a maritime transportation system. However, for a ship towing system, which is characterized by multiple vessels and physical connections, the research works about collision avoidance is limited. Thus, this paper proposes a speed and heading control-based conflict resolution of a ship towing system for collision avoidance. Two systems compose the core of the proposed conflict resolution: the risk assessment system and the coordination control system. The risk assessment is to identify the conflict and determine the time of avoiding action by calculating the index of conflict and the available maneuvering margin. The coordination control is based on the model predictive control (MPC) strategy to cooperatively control two tugboats for regulating the position, heading, and speed of the manipulated ship. Simulation experiments show that according to the index of conflict, the time cost, and the fuel consumption, a selected operation of combined heading and speed can be recommended for a ship towing system to provide a safer and more efficient towage manipulation.

Towing operations are highly reliant on the experience of the towing operators. Safety concerns arise when towing operations are subjected to environmental disturbances and dynamic traffic conditions. However, a systematic framework and approaches to enhance the safety and automation of towing operations remain lacking. This work proposes a framework of collision prevention of ship towing operations under environmental disturbance in near port waters. The focus is to prevent internal collisions between tug and assisted ship and provide early warning of possible collisions with other surrounding ships. A cooperative multi-agent control strategy is employed to specify the direction and magnitude of the towing force of the two tugs in real-time. Therefore, in the presence of environmental disturbance, the assisted ship can sail along the planned trajectory, and the acceptable safe geometric distance between each ship pair in the towing system is guaranteed. Further, a COLREGs-compliant collision alert system is designed to promptly remind the towing operators of a collision hazard with nearby ships, and different alert levels indicate different action obligations of towing operators. This proposed framework and developed methods are applied to a tandem towing system consisting of two tugs and one assisted ship to test its feasibility.