Grey relational analysis of environmental influencing factors of autonomous ships' maneuvering decision-making

Abstract

The natural environmental factors that typically affect the safe environment of maritime traffic are weather conditions and ocean conditions, specifically, wind, current, and waves. The environmental influence factors affect the ship's navigation and the crew's decisions by affecting the ship's maneuverability, along with the skill and mentality of the crew. In addition, autonomous ship maneuvering decisions are influenced by several factors, and it is especially important to distinguish the crucial influencing factors for efficient selection of the corresponding maneuvering decisions. At the same time, the autonomous ship maneuvering decision factors are a typical 'grey system which is suitable for the research by grey relational analysis. Therefore, this study mainly focuses on the concept of human-like maneuvering for the autonomous ship. Based on the actual crews' operational data from full-task handling simulation platform, we proposed a grey relational analysis model to prioritize the environmental influencing factors, thus to analyze the decision-making mechanisms for specific ship maneuvering scenario. This method can mine the key factors which affect maneuvering decisions and provide guidance for an autonomous ship-assisted or automatic maneuvering system and promotes the application of autonomous ships.