Copyright © 2011 Xin Yu Zhang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Navigation safety has a huge impact on the world economy and our everyday lives. One navigation safety simulation model in ECDIS based on international standard format (S-57) is put forward, which is mainly involved in route plan and route monitoring. The universal kriging interpolation is used in the route planning and to compute the water depth of any place in the sea bottom. The man-machine conversation method is taken to amend planned route to obtain autodeciding of feasibility according to ECDIS information, and the route monitoring algorithm is improved by enhancing its precision caused by screen coordinate conversion. The DCQA (distance close quarters situation of approach) model and TCQA (time close quarters situation of approach) model are adopted to judge if the close quarters situation or the risk of collision between own ship and target ship is emerging. All these methods are proven to be reliable through the navigation simulator made by Dalian Maritime University which is certified by DNV to class A.