E-navigation poses significant challenges for shipping. The analysis of the legal norms in the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGS) and court decisions supports the use of information technology on the bridge for the purpose of improving navigational safety. However, the current regulatory and standardisation requirements hamper the introduction of new information streams in navigational systems and remove the incentives for investment in navigation technology. The liability arising from navigational failures will remain on the employer of the crew irrespective of how the additional navigational information is provided to the navigational systems. The shipowner's liability may depend on the way information streams are provided to the ship only within the context of the Civil Liability Convention (CLC) 1992 and other similar pollution conventions where the characterisation of the navigational system as a navigational aid or an aid to navigation may decide the issue of liability. Research on the legal background of these terms underlines the need for a clear distinction between the two terms to be made. An interpretation is proposed which ensures that the CLC liability exception operates in accordance with the underlying legal requirements.

Visual navigation is comparatively advanced without a Global Positioning System (GPS). It obtains environmental information via real-time processing of the data gained through visual sensors. Compared with other methods, visual navigation is a passive method that does not launch light or other radiation applications, thus making it easier to hide. The novel navigation system described in this paper uses stereo-matching combined with Inertial Measurement Units (IMU). This system applies photogrammetric theory and a matching algorithm to identify the matching points of two images of the same scene taken from different views and obtains their 3D coordinates. Integrated with the orientation information output by the IMU, the system reduces model-accumulated errors and improves the point accuracy.

The three research topics, ship collision risk assessment, ship traffic hotspot detection and prediction, and collision-avoidance based ship path planning, are vital for next-generation vessel traffic management and monitoring systems. The system development is closely related to big data analytics and artificial intelligence for restricted waters. This study, therefore, aims to analyse the state-of-the art of these three topics over the latest decade, identify research gaps, and shed light on future research avenues. To achieve these three objectives, we critically and systematically review related articles that were published during the period between 2011 and 2021. We believe that this comprehensive and critical literature review would have a significant and profound impact on the formal safety assessment and vessel traffic management, and monitoring studies because it is not only an extension but also an essential continuity work of the literature review on maritime waterway risk assessment and prediction, as well as ship path guidance for ship collision risk mitigation in accordance with current automation vessels development and modern intelligent port construction.

An interplanetary autonomous navigation network, named the Internet of Spacecraft (IoS), is proposed in this paper to enable a Solar System-wide autonomous navigation capability for spacecraft. This network consists of two types of spacecraft, namely host and client spacecraft. The former provide the absolute reference for the whole network, and the latter determine their positions by communicating with the host spacecraft or other client spacecraft. To investigate the performance of IoS, a detailed application scheme that supports a flight from Earth to Mars is developed and analysed. IoS is not a simple extension of the navigation constellation. It is independent of the ground tracking system and the configuration of the network is flexible in that any spacecraft-installed identical device can be added to it. Moreover, client spacecraft whose positions have been determined can also be regarded as host spacecraft and provide further navigation information to others. This paper aims to provide technical support for future deep space exploration.

The tourist attraction of a cruise itinerary is composed of the on board experience plus the shore-based experience. Due to the positive dynamism of the cruise industry since the beginning of the twenty-first century, cruise lines are driven to innovate to create new experiences that help maintain high demand rates. From the point of view of creating new experiences on land, cruise lines move their vessels from one destination region to another to maximise the vessel's occupancy and to offer itineraries with a wider variety of shore-based attractions. These new itinerary designs lead to alterations in the seasonality patterns of the neighbouring regions. In this work, the 17 most important cruise ports located in the northeast quadrant of the Atlantic Ocean are analysed to find groups of ports with homogeneous seasonality patterns using clustering techniques. The analysis showed two different seasonality patterns. Consequently, some implications to improve the use of the ports of both clusters are included.

The objective of ground collision avoidance systems (GCAS) is to assure the separation of aircraft during flight operations, GCAS can be divided into tactical and strategic systems. The term tactical implies conflict prediction made after every radar scan and with approximately a one minute look ahead time. The aim of the study is to build up a mathematical model which uses only radar information and predicts potential conflicts within a fixed time, p, which may differ in different areas.

For the travelling public in the late eighties and early nineties, the most disturbing characteristic of air travel must be delays. In Europe, this is certainly the case. These delays not only cause much inconvenience to the air travellers but also generate high costs for the aircraft operators. To a large extent, these delays are due to an imbalance between the air traffic demand and the capacity of the present Air Traffic Control (ATC) system in Europe.

An analytical method and algorithm for great elliptic sailing (GES) calculations is presented. The method solves the complete GES problem calculating not only the great elliptic arc distance, but also other elements of the sailing such as the geodetic coordinates of intermediate points along the great elliptic arc. The proposed formulas provide extremely high accuracies and are straightforward to be exploited immediately in the development of navigational software, without the requirement to use advanced numerical methods. Their validity and effectiveness have been verified with numerical tests and comparisons to extremely accurate geodetic methods for the direct and inverse geodetic problem.

An Electronic Navigational Chart (ENC) is a two-dimensional abstraction and generalisation of the real world and it limits users' ability to obtain more real and rich spatial information of the navigation environment. However, a three-dimensional (3D) chart could dramatically reduce the number of human errors and improve the accuracy and efficiency of manoeuvring. Thus it is important to be able to visualize charts in 3D. This article proposes a new model for future Electronic Chart Display and Information Systems (ECDIS) and describes our approach for the construction of web-based multi-resolution future ECDIS implemented in our system Automotive Intelligent Chart (AIC) 3D ECDIS, including multi-resolution riverbed construction technology, multi-layer technology for data fusion, Mercator transformation of the model, rendering and web publishing methods. AIC 3D ECDIS can support global spatial data and 3D visualization, which merges the 2D vector electronic navigational chart with the three-dimensional navigation environment in a unified framework and interface, and is also published on the web to provide application and data service through the network.

Evidence for the existence of risk compensation behaviour in the operation of vessels is shown in the paper The Risk Homeostasis Theory (Baniela and Ríos, 2010). In that analysis, it is concluded that the people engaged in the commercial affairs of ships tend to exchange the level of safety standard of vessels for a more profitable and riskier activity, which makes the rate of shipping accidents fluctuate within certain limits. Since the different levels of power and motivation of those involved in the risk-taking process were not considered in that research, it is the aim of this paper to analyse, on the one hand, how the pressure of the shipping market influences the risk behaviour of shipping business decision-makers and to show, on the other hand, how this influence makes them alter their target level of risk and introduce risks related to low operating cost strategies on vessels. This behavioural adaptation to the shipping market demand has led the human element to be regarded as a factor of risk in the activity of commercial vessels. In this context, the increasing incidence of human errors has arisen as a consequence of practices and manning policies established by the managers of shipping companies.

The shape, size and orientation of the protected volume of airspace generated by the airborne collision avoidance system currently known as TCAS II are derived. While based on constant-velocity aircraft flight paths the results are shown to have more general application. It is also shown how the essential features of the protected volume may be used to calculate alarm rates for some simple traffic patterns.

After Selective Availability (SA) was turned off, the rate of change with time of the DGPS common errors (atmospheric delay, satellite orbit and clock error) became quite slow. This inevitably leads to a requirement to modify various configurations of DGPS correction message broadcasting, and reference station (RS) managers need to examine the characteristics of GPS measurement errors with SA-off. GPS error sources are temporally and spatially decorrelated, so the DGPS user position accuracy is varied by the baud-rate of the RS, the distance between the user and the station, and the noise statistics of the receiver. We identify the minimum and maximum size of correction data, interval time, the coverage range and the baud-rate that are required to maintain the existing DGPS service. Moreover, the compatibility and accuracy can be assessed to meet the users' requirements without measurements being needed. The results in this paper are used in the study and testing for the redesign of United States Coast Guard (USCG) RS. We hope that our study will be a great help in determining the flexible factors of both the RS and the user.

Developing risk models to predict where collisions between vessels might occur is hindered by the relative sparsity of collisions. To address this, vessel encounters and near-misses have been used as a surrogate indicator of collision risk, referred to as ‘domain analysis’. When constructed empirically, using historical information, previous work is challenged by the multitude of factors which influence the passing distances between vessels. Within this paper, we conduct data mining of big vessel traffic datasets to determine the encounter characteristics across different waterways, vessel types and speeds, weather conditions and other exploratory variables. To achieve this, we utilise a novel approach of machine learning through a random forest algorithm to predict the critical passing distance between vessels in a multitude of conditions. We contribute a far greater range of influencing factors on domain size and shape than previous studies. Finally, we investigate the potential advantages of this approach to assess the spatial risk of collision across a large region. The results help to establish the factors that influence collision risk between navigating vessels and enable empirical maritime risk assessments.

The potential benefit of predictive information for navigation support was investigated in a simulator study. Twelve participants had to guide a medium-size vessel across a traffic separation scheme. In the simulator, critical vessel traffic scenarios were created, where participants were provided with: (i) baseline Automatic Radar Plotting Aid (ARPA) information, and (ii) baseline ARPA information supplemented with capability prediction information. This is information that shows the predicted manoeuvring margins of the vessel, indicating the predicted boundaries of safe operation. Results of the experiment indicate that capability prediction allows better anticipation by the navigator, significantly improving ship navigation performance.

The volume of maritime vessel data, such as available from the Automatic Identification System (AIS), places considerable burden on systems designed and developed to manage data pertaining to maritime traffic. A properly designed and implemented data management infrastructure can provide benefits to the maritime domain awareness research community by supporting data volumes, diverse user needs, and product management. Such an infrastructure has been constructed on a modest budget by utilising open-source technologies. This paper describes the Maritime Situational Awareness Research Infrastructure (MSARI), and the design of the underlying database to meet data volume and user analysis needs. The resulting infrastructure currently handles input rates of approximately two billion vessel reports per month. This work is of potential benefit to those in the navigational community interested in the long-term storage and usage of global vessel data such as that available from AIS.

Separation schemes together with Vessel Traffic Services improve existing standards. Since their role has proved to be rather passive it is assumed that the introduction of active measures could be beneficial and improvement in terms of collision or accident risk reduction is expected. The concept raises a wide variety of problems that are to be discussed, defined and solved.

The current state of the shipping and ship-building industries indicates that they are having difficulty surviving. This is especially so in Japan, which imports oil, ores, food and most of the materials used in manufacturing products for the domestic and foreign markets. The issue of maintaining stable and effective transportation overseas is, therefore, vital.

Before 1972 the Collision Regulations were drafted so as to enable a court to decide which vessel was to be blamed rather than to assist the mariner to avoid collision. The new Regulations have been drafted primarily to assist mariners to prevent collisions at sea. Even so, actions to avoid collision required by the Rules are described in abstract terms because of the variety of visibility, sea-room available, manoeuvring capability of the vessels and the nature of the encounters. In order to help mariners understand the requirements of action to avoid collision both in quality and quantity, some reference data are recommended by experienced mariners and researchers. This paper is an attempt to introduce a study on quantification of the term substantial action to avoid collision and the distance of last-minute action in turning to avoid collision.

There is an undeniable recognition that maritime cybersecurity risk management should involve process, technology, and people. However, thus far, most studies have focused on the technical and process aspects of maritime cybersecurity, more than on the human element. On a vessel, the Electronic Chart Display and Information System (ECDIS) is, amongst all the electronic devices on the bridge, a complex and indispensable maritime sociotechnical system that must consider both technical and human aspects. In the context of maritime cyber resilience, it is important to note that when developing strategies for maritime cybersecurity, one cannot only consider technical security measures and ignore human error, as this does not adhere to good cybersecurity practice. To address this, this study aims to identify the navigating officers’ responsibilities for ECDIS cybersecurity and find the human error probabilities during these tasks via the SLIM-based human reliability analysis method. The outputs of this study provide an insight for industrial policies and best practices, in ECDIS cybersecurity risk management in terms of the behavioural and cultural aspects of shipping.

New signals from the modernised satellite navigation systems (GPS and GLONASS) and the ones that are being developed (COMPASS and GALILEO) will present opportunities for more accurate and reliable positioning solutions. Successful exploitation of these new signals will also enable the development of new markets and applications for difficult environments where the current Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) cannot provide satisfying solutions. This research is aiming to exploit the improvement in monitoring, modelling and mitigating the atmospheric effects using the increased number of signals from the future satellite systems. Preliminary investigations were conducted on the numerical weather parameter based horizontal tropospheric delay modelling, as well as the ionospheric higher order and scintillation effects. Results from this research are expected to provide a potential supplement to high accuracy positioning techniques.