This paper presents an optimal approach to the multi-objective synthesis of path following and rudder roll reduction for a container ship in heavy waves. An improved line of sight principle with course-keeping in track-belt is proposed to guide the ship in accordance with marine practice. Concise robust controllers for the course and roll motion based on Backstepping and closed-loop gain shaping are developed. The control parameters have obvious physical significance. The determination method is given and much effort is made to guarantee the uniform asymptotic stability of the closed-loop systems by Lyapunov synthesis. Furthermore, the multi-objective optimization method a fast and elitist multi-objective genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) is used to solve the restrictions caused by the model perturbation, external disturbance and performance trade-off. Contrasting with the existing literature, the research strategy and control performance are more in line with marine engineering practice. Simulation results illustrate the performances and effectiveness of the proposed system.

This paper presents an adaptive approach to the federated filter for multi-sensor nonlinear systems with cross-correlations between process noise and local measurement noise. The adaptive Gaussian filter is used as the local filter of the federated filter for the first time, which overcomes the performance degradation caused by the cross-correlated noises. Two kinds of adaptive federated filters are proposed, one uses a de-correlation framework as local filter, and the subfilter of the other one is defined as a Gaussian filter with correlated noises at the same-epoch, and much effort is made to verify the theoretical equivalence of the two algorithms in the nonlinear fusion system. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms are superior to the traditional federated filter and Gaussian filter with same-paced correlated noises, and the equivalence between the proposed algorithms and high degree cubature federated filter is also demonstrated.

This paper proposes an improved high degree cubature federated filter for the nonlinear fusion system with cross-correlation between process and measurement noises at the same time using the fifth-degree cubature rule and the decorrelated principle in its local filters. The master filter of the federated filter adopts the no-reset mode to fuse local estimates of local filters to generate a global estimate according to the scalar weighted rule. The air-traffic maneuvering target tracking simulations are performed between the proposed filter and the fifth-degree cubature federated filter. Simulations results demonstrate that the proposed filter not only can achieve almost the same accuracy as the fifth-degree cubature federated filter with independent white noises, but also has superior performance to the fifth-degree cubature federated filter while the noises are cross-correlated at the same time.

In this paper, a concise robust control law based on Backstepping for marine engine speed regulation is presented with the uniform asymptotic stability of the closed‐loop system proved by Lyapunov synthesis, and the control parameters have obvious physical meaning. Furthermore, parameter determination method is given by virtue of closed‐loop gain shaping algorithm. To overcome the perturbation due to load or interference change, variable universe fuzzy inference is introduced to optimize the control system on‐line. Compared with the existing research literature, the design method and performance of the controller are more in line with the ocean engineering practice. The results of the simulations of the proposed controller are presented and compared.

To solve the low quality of marine practice teaching, caused by limited training ship number and type, few practice route and high practice expense, the necessity and feasibility of school-enterprise cooperation in maritime education are discussed in accordance with the maritime education in China. By analyzing the existing domestic and international cooperation models together with their problems, more reasonable cooperation models of marine practice teaching are brought up under school-enterprise cooperative education model, which has important significance for application oriented shipping personnel training. Further more, the conflict between school and enterprise is discussed, and the cooperative education model is only effective in condition of win-win situation. It is necessary to establish state-run training fleets for the marine students and the instructor team too. At last, the cooperation education model based on school-enterprise-industrygovernment is brought up for further reforming of maritime education to adapt to the needs of the modern shipping industry.