Improved Non-Probabilistic Roadmap Method for Determination of Shortest Nautical Navigation Path

Probabilistic Roadmap (PRM) is one of the methods for finding the shortest path between Beginning and destination way-points on maritime shipping routes. The main behavior of the algorithm is based on assigning randomly distributed nodes on search space, finding the alternative routes, and then selecting the shortest one among them. As its name indicates, these path candidates are determined according to the position of the randomly distributed nodes at the beginning of the PRM algorithm. Therefore, it is not possible to obtain the global (or near global) shortest path. Hence, in this paper, two issues are considered i) omit the randomness with the previously proposed methodologies and ii) reduce the total track mileage with the aid of Hooke-Jeeves algorithm which is one of the classical optimization algorithm. To present the performance of this proposed framework, 20 different scenarios are defined. The PRM-HJ couple and PRM are applied to all these test problems and results are compared with respect to the total track mileage.