About the project
How can we demonstrate that autonomous navigation systems are safe within their intended operating conditions? This project will develop Operational Design Domain (ODD)-based safety validation and assurance methods. it will use representative, critical and degraded scenarios to evaluate system performance, identify operational safety boundaries, and generate credible evidence supporting the safe deployment of autonomous ships.
Autonomous navigation systems must operate safely across complex and changing maritime environments. Demonstrating this safety is challenging because it is impossible to test every combination of traffic, environmental and system conditions that an autonomous ship may encounter. New approaches are therefore needed to determine whether sufficient evidence exists to support safe operation within a defined Operational Design Domain (ODD).
This project will develop ODD-based methods for the safety validation and assurance of autonomous navigation systems. The research will investigate how maritime operational conditions can be systematically represented as a scenario space covering traffic situations, environmental conditions, vessel behaviour and autonomous system states. Historical maritime data will be used to identify representative navigation scenarios, while simulation-based methods will be developed to generate critical, rare, boundary and degraded scenarios that may expose system vulnerabilities.
The project will investigate how autonomous navigation performance can be evaluated across these scenarios using safety-related measures such as collision avoidance, vessel separation, navigational risk, international regulations for preventing collisions at sea (COLREGs) compliance and successful fallback. Particular attention will be given to identifying the boundaries within which autonomous functions can operate safely and understanding how safety performance changes as conditions approach or exceed those boundaries.
The research will further examine how scenario coverage, system performance, uncertainty analysis and validation results can be transformed into structured safety evidence. Safety-case approaches may be used to establish traceable relationships between safety claims, operational risks, test scenarios and supporting evidence. The project will contribute new methods for scenario-based validation and evidence-based safety assurance, supporting the certification, regulatory assessment and safe deployment of future autonomous ships.
The School of Engineering is committed to promoting equality, diversity inclusivity as demonstrated by our Athena SWAN award. We welcome all applicants regardless of their gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation or age, and will give full consideration to applicants seeking flexible working patterns and those who have taken a career break. The University has a generous maternity policy, onsite childcare facilities, and offers a range of benefits to help ensure employees’ well-being and work-life balance. The University of Southampton is committed to sustainability and has been awarded the Platinum EcoAward.
