A Review of the Current Collision Regulations to Embrace Maritime 4.0 and Multiple Ship Situations

Abstract

The age of sailing ships and primitive tools has evolved into one of power-driven vessels with autonomous technology that can transform the role of the navigating navigator to a monitoring navigator and relocate the human from ship to shore. This paper provides a comprehensive study of the current collision regulations and humbly suggests simple changes to embrace Maritime 4.0 and manage multiple ship situations for safe intelligent navigation. Collision avoidance is not about a ship meeting another ship with the actions regulated. In reality, the navigator is confronted with a multitude of ships and situations where the risk of collision exists, with several vessels requiring avoiding action or maintaining course and speed as dictated by current rules. SMART technology can provide quick and dependable computed actions to assist the navigator, reducing human error or the widely disparate actions that individual humans may take. Unmanned ships may ultimately be the future of shipping because eliminating human error is only possible if the human is removed.  Collating measurable effective actions from reputed ship masters for a multitude of collision scenarios and programming them into an artificial intelligence system, will provide stable and predictable collision avoidance actions that can be shared on inclusive platforms with other ships in the vicinity. This eliminates the variable action of humans and synchronizes manned and autonomous vessels to provide accurate predictive movements and big data computation. It is time to review current collision regulations and address complications in order to achieve clarity and simplicity when it comes to unmanned ships. Only by balancing technology and humans through a defined regulatory framework that includes both can the desired outcomes be realized.