OPTIMIZATION APPROACH TO THE GUIDANCE AND CONTROL OF MARINE VEHICLES

Modern optimization ideology can be treated now as one of the most powerful instruments for the modeling, analysis and synthesis of various type dynamic systems, including sophisticated automatic controllers for providing guidance and control of marine crafts. Such a situation is explained by universality, flexibility, and convenience of modern optimization methods with respect to relevant marine control applications. This work represents some new results in the development and utilization of the optimization approach for the analysis and design of marine systems such as automatic weather routing, automatic steering, dynamic positioning and others. It is well known that these problems should be considered when taking into account a vast set of requirements, restrictions, and conditions to be satisfied by an appropriate choice of control decision. This determines a specific proposed way to formalize a practical problem in optimization manner. Correspondent partial situations are discussed with orientation to fuel economy, improved reliability and performance enhancement.