Consensus Control for Vessel Traffic: the state of Arts and Prospects

With the rapid increase of port throughout, the number of vessels increases and the vessel traffic form become more complex. Therefore, how to realize the maximum utilization of limited navigation resources becomes one of the hottest issues. The consensus and coordination control of multi-agent systems could be adopted in the vessel traffic systems to improve the navigation efficiency and ensure safety in the water traffic. This paper reviews related work of the application of multi-agent system consensus control in the vessel traffic. In-depth analysis and discussion is made on swarming, distributed coordination control, consensus with external disturbances, and formation problems in the water traffic system. And also some challenging problems and prospects are presented.