A Marine GIS Based Alert System to Prevent Vessels Collision with Offshore Platforms

Abstract

How to effectively use an intelligent aid-to-navigation (AtoN) to prevent ships from accidently colliding with offshore marine platforms (OMPs) is an important issue for maritime environment. This study proposes a novel collision alert system with three components to process Automatic Identification System (AIS) data in the cloud and broadcast AtoNs to ships in order to avoid collision with OMPs. The first component receives as input fuzzy linguistic variables (vessel size, relative speed, and approach distance) from the AIS data and calculates the radius of the guarding ring. The second component serves a Marine GIS (MGIS), where the system simulates the alert based on a fuzzy guarding ring at one of three levels: green (continuous light), amber (slow flash and alarm), and red (flash and fast alarm). The third component is a warning indicator device, signaling the risk of collision between moving ships and offshore platforms. The MGIS component can also be used on an OMP to alert approaching ships and to warn offshore platform workers and vessel traffic service (VTS) on-duty operators. The ability of the proposed system to protect OMPs from vessel collisions has been verified. Other potential applications include offshore wind turbines, oil rigs, or other working platforms.