Abstract
Traffic management is not formally organised in the maritime domain. Ships are autonomous and find their own way. Traffic is organised through rules, regulations, and “good seamanship”; it is a distributed system. In areas of high traffic-density support is proved by vessel traffic service (VTS) to promote traffic safety and fluency. VTS does not take control. This organisational structure has proven itself in situations with sufficient resources. When resources become insufficient (e.g. not enough sailing space), the traffic needs an organising mechanism. In this article, the authors argue that the most promising way to do this is by organising centralised planning coordination, whilst leaving maritime traffic a distributed system with no additional central control.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank several people who helped during the preparation of this article: Chris de Rijk (Port of Amsterdam) for discussing VTS processes, Harry Tabak (Dutch Pilots) for discussing voyage planning, and Marcus Arenius, Karl Bruno, and Albert Kircher for reviewing and commenting draft versions. Finally, our thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments about the structure of this article.
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van Westrenen, F., Praetorius, G. Maritime traffic management: a need for central coordination?. Cogn Tech Work 16, 59–70 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10111-012-0244-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10111-012-0244-5