A Negotiation Framework for Automatic Collision Avoidance between Vessels

Automatic vessel collision-avoidance systems have been studied in the fields of artificial intelligence and navigation for decades. And to facilitate collision- avoidance decision-making in any two-vessel- encounter situation, several expert and fuzzy expert systems have been developed. However, none of them can negotiate with each other as seafarers usually do when they intend to make a more economic overall collision-avoidance plan in the COLREG-HIGH-COST situations where collision avoidance following the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea(COLREG) costs too much. In this paper, a negotiation framework is put forward to enable vessels to negotiate to optimize collision avoidance in the COLREG-HIGH-COST situations at open sea. With the framework proposed in this paper, two vessels involved in a COLREG-HIGH-COST situation can negotiate with each other to get a more economic overall collision-avoidance plan than that suggested by the legacy collision- avoidance systems alone.