Evolutionary sets of safe ship trajectories: development of the method

The Evolutionary Sets of Safe Ship Trajectories is a method solving ship encounter situations. The method combines evolutionary approach to planning ship trajectory with some of the assumption of game theory. For given positions and motion parameters the method finds a near optimal set of safe trajectories of all ships involved in an encounter. The version presented here is an updated one and its authors have tested extensively various problem-dedicated specialized operators as well as various formulas for fitness function to obtain best effects.In the course of this process it turned out that classic evolutionary mechanisms had to be modified for better performance. Also, intuitional fitness function directly resembling goal function has been replaced with a more complex one, which includes additional COLREGS-compliance factors.
EVOLUTIONARY SETS OF SAFE SHIP TRAJECTORIES: DEVELOPMENT OF THE METHOD
Evolutionary sets of safe ship trajectories is a method for solving potential collision situations, combining an evolutionary approach with selected assumptions of game theory. For given positions and motion parameters of ships, the method finds a set of safe trajectories for all ships involved in the encounter. Presented here is the second, updated version of the method, during the development of which the authors tested various operators and fitness functions to achieve the best possible results. In the course of this process, classic evolutionary mechanisms were modified to improve performance. Furthermore, the originally used objective function was replaced with a more complex one, which includes additional penalties for violating COLREGs rules.
1. INTRODUCTION
In general, the main approaches to the problem of planning optimal ship trajectories in encounter situations are based on either differential games or on evolutionary programming. (…)

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