Krasowski, Hanna (University of California, Berkeley), Schärdinger, Stefan (Technical University of Munich)

CommonOcean-Sim: A Traffic Simulation Environment for Unmanned Surface Vessels

Scheduled for presentation during the Invited Session "S19a-Artificial Transportation Systems and Simulation" (TH-LM-T19), Thursday, November 20, 2025, 10:30−10:50, Surfers Paradise 1

2025 IEEE 28th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), November 18-21, 2025, Gold Coast, Australia

This information is tentative and subject to change. Compiled on October 18, 2025

Abstract

Autonomous vessels have the potential to enhance maritime safety and mitigate environmental, economic, and injury risks. However, research in this domain remains limited, partly due to a lack of benchmarks and open-source tools tailored to maritime applications. The CommonOcean platform addresses this gap by providing software and traffic scenarios for motion planning research on unmanned surface vessels. In this paper, we introduce a major extension: CommonOcean-Sim, a modular simulation environment for heterogeneous multi-agent maritime traffic. CommonOcean-Sim enables configurable simulation using real-world or handcrafted safety-critical maritime scenarios, and various vessel types. Users can select controllers that ensure reactive and traffic rule compliant navigation according to the Convention on the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGS). CommonOcean-Sim features a modular architecture that allows for seamless integration of custom control algorithms as well as extensive configurability and scalability to a multitude of traffic situations, including heterogeneous high-density traffic. We demonstrate these capabilities on a variety of traffic scenarios, highlighting the potential of CommonOcean-Sim to facilitate research on autonomous vessels. CommonOcean-Sim is available at commonocean.cps.cit.tum.de/commonocean-sim.