Traffic Organization Service for Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS) with Different Degrees of Autonomy

Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS) have been an important direction for the development of intelligent shipping. However, most current international research on MASS focuses on navigation assistance technologies such as perception and decision-making, ignoring MASS’s traffic organization and management. The traffic organization service (TOS) under the e-Navigation strategy also has not researched MASS. In this paper, we propose the notion of on-demand service to MASS with different degrees of autonomy (DoA) and develop a new maritime service (MS) applicable to the MASS with various (DoA) following the e-Navigation technical architecture. We first analyze MASS requirements with different degrees of autonomy in traffic organization to define the service information. Then, based on the traditional TOS, we developed the MASS traffic organization service (MTOS), consisting of an operational architecture, five subsystems, and four services. In particular, we proposed a phased service trigger mechanism to solve the problem of publishing untimely and redundant service information. Tianjin port and Huanghua port were selected as cases study for simulation experiments; the study finding revealed that MTOS could provide standardized, accurate, and efficient traffic organization service for MASS with different degrees of autonomy on demand. The contribution can be applied in the port operation to improve traffic safety.