. EXPANDING ECDIS FUNCTIONALITY FOR PRELIMINARY ROUTING IN THE PORT WATER

Abstract

The widespread use of ECDIS on merchant marine vessels and the transfer to paperless navigation increased demands on navigation information systems. The purpose of this article is to expand the functionality of ECDIS. When the route is planned, at first the navigator has to study the sailing directions of the expected navigation areas, which have both paper and electronic catalogs. However, the availability of electronic catalogs does not provide any other advantage besides the existence of such information in non-paper form, since it is not structured for further use. This may be due to the large amount of data that needs to be analyzed for the safe passage of the various ports. Nevertheless, it is possible to single out the main parameters that the navigator studies for preliminary route, which means it is ability to structure the information, and arrange some additional data as text messages during the route checking. If such a data organization system exists, it is possible to expand the functionality of ECDIS for automatic route editing. So, the amount of information on the legs of the route increases, the time for determining the final result decreases. The article presents such a concept scheme of the data structures organization and algorithms for its use to increase the information level of the route elaboration. Since the operation of the algorithms depends on the fullness of the corresponding databases, a necessary condition for implementation is the openness of the vector maps data structures. The next step to increase the quality of the route elaboration is the development of methods for automatic analysis of the route text for filling the databases and possibly expanding their detail. The developed data structures and algorithms do not exclude the need to study the sailing directions during preliminary routing, however, they allow informing about the mandatory actions in the selected port water area at a certain time or in a certain place.