ABSTRACT: Distributed Stochastic Search Algorithm (DSSA) is one of state-of-the-art distributed algorithms for the ship collision avoidance problem. In DSSA, whenever a ship encounters with any number of other ships (neighboring ships), she will select her course with a minimum cost after coordinating their decisions with her neighboring ships. The original DSSA assumes that ships can change only their courses while keeping their speed considering kinematic properties of ships in general. However, considering future possibilities to address more complex situations that may cause ship collision or to deal with collision of other vehicles (such as mobile robots or drones), the options of speed changes are necessary for DSSA to make itself more flexible and extensive. In this paper, we present DSSA+, as a generalization of DSSA, in which speed change are naturally incorporated as decision variables in the original DSSA. Experimental evaluations are provided to show how powerful this generalization is.

KEYWORDS: Colregs, ARPA, Collision Avoidance, Collision Avoidance Algorithm, Vessel Course Changes, Vessel Speed Changes, Distributed Stochastic Search Algorithm (DSSA), Distributed Constraint Optimization Problem (DCOP)

REFERENCES