A probabilistic risk approach for the collision detection of multi-ships under spatiotemporal movement uncertainty

Abstract It is vital to analyse ship collision risk for preventing collisions and improving safety at sea. The state-of-the-art of ship collision risk analysis focuses on encountering conflict between ship pairs, subject to a strong assumption of the ships having no/little spatiotemporal motion uncertainty. This paper proposes a probabilistic conflict detection approach to estimate potential collision risk of various multi-vessel encounters, in which the spatiotemporal-dependent patterns of ship motions are newly taken into account through quantifying the trajectory uncertainty distributions using AIS data. The estimation accuracy and efficiency are assured by employing a two-stage Monte Carlo simulation algorithm, which provides the quantitative bounds on the approximation accuracy and allows for a fast estimation of conflict criticality. Several real experiments are conducted using the AIS-based trajectory data in Ningbo-Zhoushan Port to demonstrate the feasibility and superiority of the proposed new approach. The results show that it enables the effective detection of collision risk timely and reliably in a complicated dynamic situation. They therefore provide valuable insights on ship collision risk prediction as well as the formulation of risk mitigation measures.