Utilization of Planned Routes and Dead Reckoning Positions to Improve Situation Awareness at Sea

Understanding a ship’s present position has been one of the most important tasks during a ship’s voyage, in both ancient and modern times. Particularly, a ship’s dead reckoning (DR) has been used for predicting traffic situations and collision avoidance actions. However, the current system that uses the traditional method of calculating DR employs the received position and speed data only. Therefore, it is not applicable for predicting navigation within the harbor limits, owing to the frequent changes in the ship’s course and speed in this region. In this study, planned routes were applied for improving the reliability of the proposed system and predicting the traffic patterns in advance. The proposed method of determining the dead reckoning position (DRP) uses not only the ships’ received data but also the navigational patterns and tracking data in harbor limits. The Mercator sailing formulas were used for calculating the ships’ DRPs and planned routes. The data on the traffic patterns were collected from the automatic identification system and analyzed using MATLAB. Two randomly chosen ships were analyzed for simulating their tracks and comparing the DR method during the timeframes of the ships’ movement. The proposed method of calculating DR, combined with the information on planned routes and DRPs, is expected to contribute towards improving the decision-making abilities of operators.