A Study of the Automatic Berthing System of a Ship Using Artificial Neural Network

In this paper, Artificial Neural Network(ANN) is applied to automatic berthing control for a ship. ANN is suitable for a maneuvering such as ship`s berthing, because it can describe non-linearity of the system. Multi-layer perceptron which has more than one hidden layer between input layer and output layer is applied to ANN. Using a back-propagation algorithm with teaching data, we trained ANN to get a minimal error between output value and desired one. For the automatic berthing control of a containership, we introduced low speed maneuvering mathematical models. The berthing control with the structure of 8 input layer units in ANN is compared to 6 input layer units. From the simulation results, the berthing conditions are satisfied, even though the berthing paths are different.