Abstract
The studies on automatic ship collision avoidance system, which have been carried out in the last 10 years, are facing on new situation due to newly developed high technology such as computer and other information system. It was almost impossible to make it used in real navigation field 3-4 years ago because of the absence of any tool to give other ship's information, however recently developed technology suggests new possibility. This study is carried out to develop the automatic ship collision avoidance support system which considers ship's manoeuvrability into it's collision avoidance algorithm. One of the important part in ship collision avoidance system is collision decision module which can calculate collision risk with other ships and act properly to avoid the situation. Many of previous researches are using present ship's dynamic data such as present speed, position and course to calculate collision risk. However when a ship commences avoidance action, the real situation is quite different with one that has been estimated by the ship's initial data due to the ship's manoeuvring characteristic. Therefore it is better to take into account ship's manoeuvring characteristic from the stage of collision decision in ship collision avoidance system. In this study, these effects are included in the developed system. The proposed system are verified its usefulness in numerical simulation environments.