Towards real-time ship collision risk analysis: An improved R-TCR model considering target ship motion uncertainty

Collision between ships is one of the major contributors to ship accidents. To facilitate the development of the real-time collision risk analysis model for collision avoidance, in this research, an improved Rule-aware Time-varying Collision risk Model is proposed, which considers the estimation of target ship motion and the corresponding uncertainty in the risk analysis process. To make the collision risk model more in line with the actual situation, ship maneuverability, the COLREGs, and good seamanship are considered and integrated into the framework of the TCR model. Firstly, the Gaussian process is used to predict the potential trajectories of the target ship. Secondly, the Probabilistic Velocity Obstacle (PVO) model is utilized to integrate the uncertainty of the target ship's motion into the collision risk model. The collision risk is therefore formulated as a ratio of available maneuvers leading to a collision to all available maneuvers. To verify the effectiveness of collision risk, two actual target ships and six groups of collision risk detection experiments under different encounter scenarios were carried out. Compared with the traditional collision risk index model and original R-TCR model, the collision risk detected by the Improved R-TCR model is closer to the actual situation.