Autonomous vessels potentially enhance safety and reliability of seaborne trade. To facilitate the development of autonomous vessels, simulations are required to model realistic interactions with other vessels. However, modeling realistic interactive maritime traffic is challenging due to the unstructured environment, coarsely specified traffic rules, and largely varying vessel types. Currently, there is no standard for simulating interactive maritime environments in order to rigorously benchmark autonomous vessel algorithms. In this paper, we introduce the first intelligent sailing model (ISM), which simulates rule-compliant vessels for navigation on the open sea. An ISM vessel reacts to other traffic participants according to maritime traffic rules while at the same time solving a motion planning task characterized by waypoints. In particular, the ISM monitors the applicable rules, generates rule-compliant waypoints accordingly, and utilizes a model predictive control for tracking the waypoints. We evaluate the ISM in two environments: interactive traffic with only ISM vessels and mixed traffic where some vessel trajectories are from recorded real-world maritime traffic data or handcrafted for criticality. Our results show that simulations with many ISM vessels of different vessel types are rule-compliant and scalable. We tested 4,049 critical traffic scenarios. For interactive traffic with ISM vessels, no collisions occurred while goal-reaching rates of about 97 percent were achieved.

翻译：自主航行船舶有望提升海上贸易的安全性与可靠性。为促进自主航行船舶的发展，需通过仿真模拟其与其他船舶的真实交互。然而，由于海洋环境非结构化、交通规则规定粗略且船舶类型差异显著，建模真实的交互式海上交通具有挑战性。目前，尚缺乏用于严格评估自主航行算法性能的交互式海洋环境仿真标准。本文首次提出智能航行模型（ISM），该模型可模拟开阔海域中遵循规则的船舶航行。ISM船舶依据海上交通规则对其他参与者做出响应，同时解决以航路点为特征的运动规划问题。具体而言，ISM监控适用规则，据此生成合规航路点，并利用模型预测控制实现航路点跟踪。我们在两种环境中评估ISM：仅含ISM船舶的交互式交通，以及混合交通场景（部分船舶轨迹来自真实海上交通数据或针对关键性手工设计）。结果表明，包含多种船型大量ISM船舶的仿真具有规则合规性与可扩展性。我们测试了4,049个关键交通场景。在仅含ISM船舶的交互式交通中，未发生碰撞，目标到达率达约97%。