A Proactive Decision Support Method for Ship Collision Awareness Incorporating Ship Maneuvering

This paper aims to enhance ship collision awareness by providing decision support in collision avoidance. To enable real-time computation in navigation, a Non-iterative Action Distance Determination Algorithm (NADDA) is developed. NADDA reduces the time complexity from <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">${O}\left( T \log n \right)$</tex-math></inline-formula> to <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">${O}\left( T\right)$</tex-math></inline-formula> by eliminating iterative processes, while maintaining the same space complexity as conventional bisection-based methods. This improvement significantly enhances computational efficiency, facilitating real-time applications. Based on NADDA, a robust and interpretable method for quantifying collision stages is developed by incorporating operational uncertainties, ship man-euverability, and the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGs), thereby providing proactive colli-sion avoidance timing. Simulation experiments and a historical collision accident validated the effectiveness of the proposed methods. The results demonstrate that NADDA reduces computa-tion time by up to 93.1% compared to existing bisection-based methods, and the proposed collision stages quantification method achieves higher accuracy due to the consideration of operational uncertainties. The proposed method exhibits strong robustness and can provide real-time decision support in multi-ship encounter scenarios involving up to four target ships.