Constraint Programming-Based Verification of COLREG Safety

COLREG sets maritime navigation safety rules that are defined to be human-interpretable. With the advent of autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs), the level of detail of the rules and completeness to ensure trustworthy navigation decisions by AI algorithms have become a subject of doubt. Proper interpr...

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Veröffentlicht in:IEEE journal of oceanic engineering Jg. 50; H. 4; S. 2797 - 2821
Hauptverfasser: Vain, Juri, Tsiopoulos, Leonidas, Walden, Marina, Benterki, Aboubaker Seddiq
Format: Journal Article
Sprache:Englisch
Veröffentlicht: New York IEEE 01.10.2025
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Schlagworte:
Autonomous surface vehicles
Autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs)
Autonomous vehicles
COLREG
Complexity theory
constraint logic programming (LP) (CLP)
Constraints
Decisions
dynamic deadlock
Frequency modulation
Logic programming
Marine vehicles
maritime autonomous surface ships (MASSs)
maritime safety
Meteorology
navigation
Navigation safety
Navigational safety
rule-based modeling
Safety
safety risk analysis
Sea surface
Space exploration
Surface vehicles
System recovery
Trajectories
Turning
Underwater navigation
Verification
ISSN:0364-9059, 1558-1691
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Zusammenfassung:COLREG sets maritime navigation safety rules that are defined to be human-interpretable. With the advent of autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs), the level of detail of the rules and completeness to ensure trustworthy navigation decisions by AI algorithms have become a subject of doubt. Proper interpretation of the rules presumes professional knowledge on maritime theory and practice. In particular, it concerns situations where the interpretation and application of rules is hardened due to ambiguous contextual conditions. In this article, we study the consistency and sufficiency of a subset of COLREG rules by applying constraint logic programming and formal verification techniques to identify corner cases that do not directly contradict COLREG, however, could lead to anomalous behavior of ASVs and induce safety hazards in uncommon but still possible navigation situations. As the main contribution, we expose the conditions under which ASVs could exhibit potentially deadlock and livelock-like behaviors. Namely, we exemplify the situations where uniform control decisions under the conditions of positional and movement symmetry of the vessels could lead to either infeasible trajectories or even to dangerous approaches. The identified cases portrayed with witnessing trajectory diagrams indicate potential ambiguities in the rules and could guide rules update in the future.
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ISSN:0364-9059
1558-1691
DOI:10.1109/JOE.2025.3592285