Multi-agent Planning for Ship Collision Avoidance

Multi-agent based planning techniques have been widely applied to various decision-making support applications. In this paper, we investigate how to apply multi-agent planning to collision avoidance in ship navigation. We have developed three multi-agent-based planning algorithms: the independent planning for self-benefit purpose, the centralized planning for union-benefit purpose and the negotiation-based planning for mutual-benefit purpose. Having introduced collision avoidance planning, we present the developed planning algorithm in detail. We also report the experiments and some results. The experimental results illustrate the feasibility and validity of the multi-agent planning for collision avoidance.