Operational Synchronization for MASS in VTS Areas

Abstract

Autonomous and automated vessels are expected to operate safely and predictably in VTS-controlled waters while achieving an equivalent level of safety to manned ships. Today, compatibility between ship-side and shore-side operational assumptions is maintained through human interpretation and communication. As onboard human mediation is reduced or removed, this compatibility becomes an explicit system require- ment that current autonomy, VTS and digital maritime service frameworks do not address. This paper identifies operational syn- chronization as the missing system-level property that determines whether the ship and VTS can algorithmically verify that their combined binding constraints admit a non-empty viable state region and detect when it becomes empty. We derive the required structure for this property, formalize it as a viable-set condition and show how synchronization violations become inspectable system states rather than implicit disagreements. Without this explicit property, safety claims about compliance, predictability and coordination remain informal and reliant on conservative assumptions or human intervention, limiting their transparency and scalability as autonomy increases.