Evolutionary approach to ship’s trajectory planning within Traffic Separation Schemes

Abstract

The paper presents the continuation of the author’s research on evolutionary approach to ship trajectory planning. While the general problem of the evolutionary trajectory planning has already been solved, no one has yet touched one of its specific aspects: evolutionary trajectory planning within Traffic Separation Schemes. Traffic Separation Scheme (TSS) is a traffic-management route system complying with rules of the International Maritime Organization. In brief, the ships navigating within a TSS all sail in the direction assigned to a particular traffic lane or they cross at a course angle as close to 90 degrees as possible. This and other TSS rules largely affect the evolutionary method. The paper presents a proposal of the extended evolutionary method, with a focus on changes that have to be made to obey TSS rules, especially the changes in the phases of evaluation and specialised operators of the evolutionary cycle.