A differential game approach to collision avoidance of ships

Abstract

A differential game method has been developed which divides the state-space into two regions. In one region ship P₂ can always cause a collision, in the other region ship P₁ can prevent a collision, provided it uses an appropriate strategy. In a future publication slightly different sets of ships will be considered such as to get a feeling for the sensitivity of the collision avoidance capacities w.r.t. the three parameters which characterize a ship (i.e. length, velocity, maximum turnrate).

The ship models considered were very simple; the speeds are constant. More realistic is that the speed decreases during manoeuvring. This, however, will make the analysis much more complicated. Another feature which has not been considered is what to do if three ships are in each other's neighborhood instead of two.