Effects of Situational Awareness Support System in the Risk of Collision with Multiple Ships

When encountering several ships in a short period of time rather than encountering a single ship, maritime officers have difficulty in situation awareness and collision avoidance decisions. A dynamic display was devised that shows the change of positions of the other ships and own ship over time. This display indicates the relative position between the other ships and own ship in the near future as well as the present and the past. This study investigated the effects of the proposed dynamic display on the maritime officers’ decision-making and situation awareness in the situations of collision risks with multiple ships. The subjects’ judgments and eye gazes in the process of judgment was measured. According to the experiment results, the proposed display was helpful to the situation awareness but did not provide directly positive effects on the collision avoidance judgment. The effect of this display appeared more in novices than in experts.