Research on Coastal Ship Evacuation Path Planning using Improved Artificial Potential Field Method

It is essential to plan ship refuge paths for safety of ship and reduction of accident loss considering many marine accidents have happened. This paper presents improved artificial potential field (APF) method for generating ship refuge paths planning along the coast. Relying on the APF model, this new approach takes into account the challenges brought by dynamic surroundings and obstacles in the coastal waters. The introduced model develops a multi-level potential field organization, the influence of the gravitational and the repulsive forces can be adjusted adaptively based on the real time environment data. Simultaneously, adaptive algorithm is integrated to adaptively modify the parameters of potential field and improve the convergence speed of the algorithm and avoid the popular local minimum problem in traditional APF methods. Additionally, the model includes a risk ranking functionality that provides prioritization of the evacuation route according to the distance of the ship to its potential hazard. The experimental results show that the proposed method has significant superiority than the existing path planning algorithms in the evacuation efficiency, path safety and travel time reduction.