Van-Suong Nguyen, Van-Cuong Do;, and Nam-Kyun Im. IJFIS 2018;18:41-9. https://doi.org/10.5391/IJFIS.2018.18.1.41

Van-Suong Nguyen and Nam-Kyun Im. IJFIS 2019;19:163-71. https://doi.org/10.5391/IJFIS.2019.19.3.163

In this article, a multitasking system is investigated for automatic ship berthing in marine practices, based on artificial neural networks (ANNs). First, a neural network with separate structures in hidden layers is developed, based on a head-up coordinate system. This network is trained once with the berthing data of a ship in an original port to conduct berthing tasks in different ports. Then, on the basis of the developed network, an integrated mechanism including three negative signs is linked to achieve an integrated neural controller. This controller can bring the ship to a berth on each side of the ship in different ports. The whole system has the ability to berth for different tasks without retraining the neural network. Finally, to validate the effectiveness of the proposed system for automatic ship berthing, numerical simulations were performed for berthing tasks, such as different ports, and berthing each side of the ship. The results indicate that the proposed system shows a good performance in automatic ship berthing.

For safe ship berthing, all steps involved, from bringing the ship to the fairway area to directing it to the final wharf position at a desirable speed, need to be performed properly. In this article, a support system is proposed to automatically bring the ship into the berth after completing the maneuvering process. This proposed system requires no involvement of a shipmaster, enabling automatic ship berthing in marine practice. Three fuzzy controllers are proposed to conduct different tasks of berthing. The first controller is designed to control the movement of the ship in a longitudinal direction towards the wharf while the second controller stabilizes the relative bearing error with respect to the tugboat. The final controller is responsible for bringing the ship into a wharf according to crabbing motion with bow thruster and tugboat simultaneously. Compared to other approaches, ours has a wider range of adoption, better generalization capability, and is more suitable for marine practice. Comprehensive experiments in numerical simulations are carried out, showing the superior performance of the proposed support system for automatic ship berthing.

In previous investigations, controllers for the track-keeping of ships were designed with the assumption of constant ship speed. However, when navigating in a fairway area, the ship’s speed is usually decreased to prepare for berthing. The existing track-keeping systems, which are applied when the ship navigates in the open sea with a constant ship speed, cannot be used to navigate the ship in the fairway. In this article, a support system is proposed for ship navigation in the fairway. This system performs three tasks. First, the ship is automatically controlled by regulating the rudder to follow planned tracks. Second, the ship’s speed is reduced step by step to approach the berth area at a low speed. Finally, at low speed, when the ship’s rudder is not effective enough to control the ship’s heading to a desired angle, the ship’s heading is adjusted appropriately by the bow thruster before changing the control mode into the automatic berthing system. By the proposed system, the automatic systems can be combined to obtain a fully automatic system for ship control. To validate the effectiveness of this proposed system for automatic ship navigation in the fairway, numerical simulations were conducted with a training ship model.