Good Seamanship Score Quantification in Complex and Congested Waterways⁎

Abstract

This paper presents a novel method to quantify seafarers’ good seamanship during navigation scenarios with multi-vessel encounters, in open and confined waters, and to compute COLREG's-compliant path deviations for avoiding collision and grounding. Accurate quantification of good seamanship necessitates comprehensive information about the vessels state and the surrounding environment, obtainable through the AIS system and electronic nautical charts. Our work advances the current state-of-the-art by: (1) incorporating a normalized grounding risk for navigating confined waters, (2) factoring in speed changes for a probabilistic assessment of collision risk, and (3) considering the minimum possible scenario risk based on vessel kinodynamic constraints. The proposed method is evaluated using historical AIS data and sea charts of Danish waters. The evaluation results demonstrate improved fairness scoring by acknowledging that navigators may lack risk-free options.