Bow Crossing Range Correlation of Small Vessels – AIS Data Analysis with Prospective Application to Autonomous Ships

Abstract

The development of technology has reduced the crews of ships. This trend leads to at least partial elimination of human crews in favour of autonomous ships. As more and more of them will be introduced, a safety problem arises when manoeuvring the ships in relation to each other. Therefore, there is a need to identify the factors that have an impact on determining how to maintain safe distances between ships in order to find relationships that will be useful for the development of autonomous ships. This can currently only be analysed on samples of manned vessels. Therefore, this paper aims to analyse the correlation of the Bow Crossing Range (BCR) with other ship-related data provided by AIS on ships up to 100 m long. The results of this study may be found interesting by academia, maritime industry, and autonomous ship developers.