Development of a navigation support system by means of a synthetic scenario

The main idea of this paper is to connect a synthetic scenario and a time domain ship dynamic simulator, in order to enhance the situational awareness of the bridge crew. The VR is used to represent the surrounding environment, and the Human-In-The-Loop (HITL) techniques permits the user to interact with the simulation. The combined use of a simulator and a synthetic scenario allows multiple choices, such as performing emergency or non-standard manoeuvres, receiving feedbacks and, in case, making the proper actions on the ship. In this paper, this approach is applied to develop a VR-based decision support system for collision avoidance, firstly implementing simple collision avoidance strategies and then elaborating the tool to visualise the information in a synthetic 3D scenario. At the end of the paper, results related to the described application are presented, and the benefits and the weakness of the proposed methodology are discussed.