Passage Planning in Coastal Waters for Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships using the D* Algorithm

Abstract

Establishing a ship's passage plan is an essential step before it starts to sail. The research related to the automatic generation of ship passage plans is attracting attention because of the development of maritime autonomous surface ships. In coastal water navigation, the land, islands, and navigation rules need to be considered. From the path planning algorithm's perspective, a ship's passage planning is a global path-planning problem. Because conventional global path-planning methods such as Dijkstra and A* are time-consuming owing to the processes such as environmental modeling, it is difficult to modify a ship's passage plan during a voyage. Therefore, the D* algorithm was used to address these problems. The starting point was near Busan New Port, and the destination was Ulsan Port. The navigable area was designated based on a combination of the ship trajectory data and grid in the target area. The initial path plan generated using the D* algorithm was analyzed with 33 waypoints and a total distance of 113.946 km. The final path plan was simplified using the Douglas–Peucker algorithm. It was analyzed with a total distance of 110.156 km and 10 waypoints. This is approximately 3.05% less than the total distance of the initial passage plan of the ship. This study demonstrated the feasibility of automatically generating a path plan in coastal navigation for maritime autonomous surface ships using the D* algorithm. Using the shortest distance–based path planning algorithm, the ship's fuel consumption and sailing time can be minimized.