Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS) and the COLREGS: Do We Need Quantified Rules Or Is 'the Ordinary Practice of Seamen' Specific Enough?

Notes

Porathe, T. (2019) 'Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS) and the COLREGS: Do We Need Quantified Rules Or Is "the Ordinary Practice of Seamen" Specific Enough?', *TransNav, the International Journal on Marine Navigation and Safety of Sea Transportation*, 13(3), pp. 511–517. doi: 10.12716/1001.13.03.04. Discussion paper (renamed from a long original filename to remove special characters) arguing that the qualitative COLREGS should NOT be quantified for autonomous-ship programmers; instead the collision-avoidance algorithms should be precise and quantitative (e.g. learned from AIS data per Operational Design Domain), while the legal text stays general. Examines the "soft" clauses (Rule 2 ordinary practice of seamen; Rules 15–17 "early and substantial"; Rule 19 restricted visibility) and advocates automation transparency — an autonomous ship must be predictable and understandable to humans on manned ships (identification light, shared situation awareness, route-exchange of intentions). Uses the self-driving-car concepts of Operational Design Domain (ODD) and degrees of autonomy. RAW PDF carries a journal-page offset: PDF p. N = orig. printed p. 510+N (PDF p. 1 = orig. p. 511).

```bibtex
@article{porathe2019mass,
  author  = {Porathe, Thomas},
  title   = {Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS) and the COLREGS: Do We Need Quantified Rules Or Is ``the Ordinary Practice of Seamen'' Specific Enough?},
  journal = {TransNav, the International Journal on Marine Navigation and Safety of Sea Transportation},
  year    = {2019},
  volume  = {13},
  number  = {3},
  pages   = {511--517},
  doi     = {10.12716/1001.13.03.04}
}
```

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