Towards approval of autonomous ship systems by their operational envelope

Abstract

Current guidelines for approval of autonomous ship systems is much focused on their intended operational area. This is a natural consequence of the complexity of these systems, but it may restrict the system to being used only in the area it is approved for. This becomes a problem if the ship is moved to a new area or when it changes owners. These systems are also dependent on case-determined sharing of responsibilities between humans and automation which makes generalization even harder. The car industry has introduced the Operational Design Domain (ODD) that can be used as a basis for approval. However, the ODD does not include the human responsibilities. We have proposed the definition of an operational envelope for autonomous ship systems that include human responsibilities and that is general enough to allow ship operation in all areas that fall within the envelope. We also show how the operational envelope can be defined using a system modelling language, such as the unified modelling language (UML).