A Concept of Autonomous Waterborne Transportation Systems and its Simulation

Abstract With the development of autonomous vehicles and intelligent infrastructure, the future waterborne transportation system participants will gradually evolve into certain degrees of autonomous intelligent agents, such as autonomous ships and intelligent ship locks. These intelligent agents will gradually become the main components of the waterborne transportation system. In this process, the varying development level of intelligence leads to individual diversity, and the overall traffic will also emerge the complexity. To ensure the safety and efficiency of the waterborne transportation system, it is necessary to study the organization, structure, and mode of the waterborne Transportation Systems(WTS), considering the diversity and complexity of the system. This paper proposed a concept of Autonomous WTS(AWTS), including the physical entity, the virtual entity, and the logical entity, describing the system’s capability, such as self-perception, self-organization, self-decision, self-control, self-adaption, and self-evolution. The AWTS contains five logical layers: the object layer, the cyberspace layer, the cognition layer, the decision-control layer, and the application layer. To investigate the advantages of AWTS, this paper demonstrated inland transportation in the bridge area as an example. The scenarios under different AWTS modes are simulated. The results indicate that traffic efficiency has been improved under AWTS modes, which shows the potential of using AWTS for improving traffic capacity and efficiency.