June 27th 2025 Annual Meeting
Keynote Speaker
Patrolling Strategies of Unmanned Surface Vehicles for Maritime Safety Monitoring
MengChu Zhou, Ph.D. & Dist. Professor
Fellow of IEEE, IFAC, AAAS, CAA and NAI
New Jersey Institute of Technology
Abstract—Maritime disasters, induced by severe weather, may sink ships and further cause fatalities by accompanying strong winds, storm tides, intense precipitation and destructive ocean waves. Though safer ships and more accurate weather forecasting help ships avoid being caught in trouble, such kind of catastrophes happen from time to time. Unmanned surface vehicles are promising to be an essential part of maritime safety monitoring since they are able to approach travelling vessels, check if vessels are seeking help, and provide timely assistance. This talk provides an overview of optimization methods designed to plan patrolling paths for unmanned surface vehicles and thus enhance maritime patrolling efficiency. For reliable monitoring through physical distress signal transmission, modeling for maritime patrolling is introduced first, with a focus on limited sensing ranges of vessels. To deal with mixed types of decision variables in this model, encoding ways are presented. A series of operators for exploring better solutions are demonstrated accordingly. Ultimately, this talk discusses the needs of coordination methods applied when unmanned surface vehicles are moving towards patrolling targets along with the designed paths.
MengChu Zhou received his B.S. degree in Control Engineering from Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, China in 1983, M.S. degree in Automatic Control from Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China in 1986, and Ph. D. degree in Computer and Systems Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY in 1990. He joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, New Jersey Institute of Technology in 1990, and is now a Distinguished Professor. His interests are in intelligent systems, robotics, Petri nets, Internet of Things, machine learning, and big data analytics. He has over 1300 publications including 17 books, over 900 journal papers including over 700 IEEE Transactions papers, 31 patents and 32 book-chapters. He is presently Senior Editor of IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, and Associate Editor of Research, IEEE Internet of Things Journal, and Frontiers of Information Technology & Electronic Engineering. He is a recipient of Excellence in Research Prize and Medal from NJIT, Humboldt Research Award for US Senior Scientists from Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and Franklin V. Taylor Memorial Award and the Norbert Wiener Award from IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society, and Edison Patent Award from the Research & Development Council of New Jersey. His work has received over 78800 GoogleScholar citations with h-index being 141. He is Fellow of IEEE, International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Chinese Association of Automation (CAA) and National Academy of Inventors (NAI).