A Method of Ship’s Path Planning at Sea
Automatic route design will help to develop electronic chart intelligence, hence to improve safety, economy and reliability of the route. In the paper rasterizing charts are used to expressed the navigation environment of the ship and the modified A* algorithm is used to compute the near optimum trajectory of a ship in given environment based on electronic chart dispiay and information system (ECDIS). By tracing Safety contours, computing obstacle areas and taking into account certain boundaries of the manoeuvring region, the problem of avoiding collisions at sea was reduced to optimization task with static constrains. Simulation using MATLAB is conducted to verify the proposed ship path planning method. The good results show the promise of this method for ship at sea.