Ship Route Planning Based on Particle Swarm Optimization

The ship route planning has two problems to solve. The first problem is how to model the environment of the navigation area, and the second one is how to use an optimal algorithm to search the global optimal route. This paper combines the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm with the tangent graph method to search the optimal ship route. At first, it uses the tangent graph method to obtain the static obstacle information and establishes the static environment model of the navigation area. It designs a cost function evaluating the total distance from the start point to the terminal point. The PSO algorithm takes the minimum value of the cost function as its target to search the global shortest route. Based on the environment model, the PSO individuals are outside of the obstacle hull area, and the optimal results are feasible solutions satisfying the requirement. It designs the detail optimization operations according to the PSO principal. The results show that the proposed route planning method is effective to get the shortest route.