Search-based Generation of Waypoints for Triggering Self-Adaptations in Maritime Autonomous Vessels

2025-07-22

AI Summary

Verifying the adaptive behavior of navigation software for Autonomous Vessels (AVs) remains challenging due to the difficulty in identifying critical operational scenarios. Method: This paper proposes a waypoint-perturbation-based critical scenario generation method. It introduces NSGA-II—a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm—for the first time to automatically synthesize boundary waypoints that trigger adaptive control mode switches. To enhance search efficiency and generalizability, three waypoint initialization strategies (WPgen variants) are designed. The method applies minimal perturbations to nominal waypoints to systematically uncover critical conditions inducing behavioral transitions. Results: Experiments across three representative AV platforms demonstrate that WPgen variants exhibit vessel-dependent performance but consistently outperform random search baselines. The approach delivers a scalable, reproducible, and automated testing framework for robustness validation and design feedback of AV navigation software.

Technology Category

• Search and Optimization: Sampling/Simulation-based Search
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Replanning and Plan Repair
• Multiagent Systems: Adversarial Agents

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Experiences and lessons learnt from Web-based algorithms and system deployments
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data generation and simulation
• Responsible Web: Human-perceived consequences of algorithmic deployment on the web

Abstract

Self-adaptation in maritime autonomous vessels (AVs) enables them to adapt their behaviors to address unexpected situations while maintaining dependability requirements. During the design of such AVs, it is crucial to understand and identify the settings that should trigger adaptations, enabling validation of their implementation. To this end, we focus on the navigation software of AVs, which must adapt their behavior during operation through adaptations. AVs often rely on predefined waypoints to guide them along designated routes, ensuring safe navigation. We propose a multiobjective search-based approach, called WPgen, to generate minor modifications to the predefined set of waypoints, keeping them as close as possible to the original waypoints, while causing the AV to navigate inappropriately when navigating with the generated waypoints. WPgen uses NSGA-II as the multi-objective search algorithm with three seeding strategies for its initial population, resulting in three variations of WPgen. We evaluated these variations on three AVs (one overwater tanker and two underwater). We compared the three variations of WPgen with Random Search as the baseline and with each other. Experimental results showed that the effectiveness of these variations varied depending on the AV. Based on the results, we present the research and practical implications of WPgen.

Problem

• Generate waypoints to trigger adaptations in maritime AVs
• Modify predefined waypoints to test navigation software
• Ensure adaptations maintain safety and dependability requirements

Innovation

• Multiobjective search-based waypoint generation
• NSGA-II algorithm with seeding strategies
• Trigger adaptations via modified waypoints