Goodwin, Elisabeth M. (1975) A statistical study of ship domains. Doctoral thesis, City of London Polytechnic.
The thesis is an attempt to establish the water area required by any one ship for safe and efficient navigation. The concept of a ship domain has been considered, which may be defined as the effective area around a ship which a navigator would like to keep free with respect to other ships and stationary objects. This area will not be the same for all ships but will depend on a variety of factors such as speed, size of ship and density of traffic among others.
The first part of the project was concerned with the collection of data from two separate sources: one being the performance of ships' officers in collision avoidance exercises on a marine radar simulator and the second being marine traffic surveys conducted in the Sunk area of the North Sea, The collection of data on ship movements and their processing for analysis by computer comprised the early work of the thesis. The next section of work was concerned with the development of a technique for evaluating the size of the domain and in particular the range of the domain boundary from the ship referred to as the domange. Very little work appears to have been done on this topic previously so several possibilities were considered before a decision was made as to the most suitable technique.
Once this had been established results were obtained for a variety of conditions such as different sea area, length of ship and experience of the navigator as well as those previously mentioned and others.
The final part of the thesis considers possible applications of the results in a variety of situations which are of current and future interest in marine traffic studies.
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