Ship's Collision Avoidance Support System Using Fuzzy-CBR

Ship's collision avoidance is a skill that masters of merchant marine vessels have acquired through years of experience and that makes them feel at ease to guide their ship out from danger quickly compared to inexperienced officers. Case based reasoning (CBR) uses the same technique in solving tasks that needs reference from variety of situations. CBR can render decision-making easier by retrieving past solutions from situations that are similar to the one at hand and make necessary adjustments in order to adapt them. In this paper, we propose to utilize the advantages of CBR in a support system for ship's collision avoidance while using fuzzy algorithm for its retrieval of similar navigational situations, stored in the casebase, thus avoiding the cumbersome tasks of creating a new solution each time a new situation is encountered. There will be two levels within the Fuzzy-CBR. The first level will identify the dangerous ships and infer the new case. The second level will retrieve cases from casebase and adapt the solution to solve for the output. While CBR's accuracy depends on the efficient retrieval of possible solutions to be adapted from stored cases, fuzzy algorithm will improve the effectiveness of solving the similarity to a new case at hand.