Framework of an Evolutionary Multi-Objective Optimisation Method for Planning a Safe Trajectory for a Marine Autonomous Surface Ship

This paper represents the first stage of research into a multi-objective method of planning safe trajectories for marine autonomous surface ships (MASSs) involved in encounter situations. Our method applies an evolutionary multi-objective optimisation (EMO) approach to pursue three objectives: minimisation of the risk of collision, minimisation of fuel consumption due to collision avoidance manoeuvres, and minimisation of the extra time spent on collision avoidance manoeuvres. Until now, a fully multi-objective optimisation has not been applied to the real-time problem of planning safe trajectories; instead, this optimisation problem has usually been reduced to a single aggregated cost function covering all objectives. The aim is to develop a method of planning safe trajectories for MASSs that is able to simultaneously pursue the three abovementioned objectives, make decisions in real time and without interaction with a human operator, handle basic types of encounters (in open or restricted waters, and in good or restricted visibility) and guarantee compliance with the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea. It should also be mentioned that optimisation of the system based on each criterion may occur at the cost of the others, so a reasonable balance is applied here by means of a configurable trade-off. This is done throughout the EMO process by means of modified Pareto dominance rules and by using a multi-criteria decision-making phase to filter the output Pareto set and choose the final solution