The Development of an Agent-Based Simulation System for Maritime Traffic with Ship Officer’s Behavior Model

Abstract

In the existing maritime traffic flow simulation, the other ship follows the initially set route regardless of the movement of the own ship, so the interaction between the own ship and the other ship’s movement in the actual maritime traffic environments cannot be reflected. To solve this problem, we provide realistic simulation environments for maritime traffic analysis based on the agent-based ship officer’s behaviour model for MASS and microscopic simulation of traffic flow. In this paper, we developed the agent-based ship officer’s behaviour model, which attempts to capture the behavioural patterns of a ship officer during an instance of ship collision. The main function of the ship officer’s behaviour model is to receive the characteristics of the ship officer and the ship, to determine encounter situations and to transmit the initial response distance, alter course, and change speed according to the navigational expertise, navigational errors and VTS control to the ship navigation agent. In addition, to verify the behavior model, we conducted the agent-based simulation prototype for maritime traffic with ship officer’s behavior model. The results of this study will be used to develop maritime traffic simulation platform in a digital environment. ？ 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.