The marine traffic control system as a distributed problem solving network

Marine shipping is collectively viewed as a group of intelligent agents, each possessing resources of sensing, communication, information processing, and decision-making. The marine traffic control problem is considered that of achieving organized, consistent behavior of the group by exploiting the knowledge and resources possessed by agents in the group, and the marine traffic control system is treated as a distributed problem-solving network. Ships are all processing nodes in the network, and they are connected with each other by some communication protocol. The approach is embodied in a system called DIPSACOM. Organizational structuring and an expectation-based negotiation mechanism for achieving effective cooperation between ships are elaborated. Simulation results demonstrating the effectiveness of the distributed problem-solving approach are presented