Ship control is not an easy problem; it is even more difficult with collision-avoiding maneuvers. In this chapter, the control of ship movement via fuzzy logic is addressed. Interesting features of this article are Figure 4, which illustrates encounter situations and membership functions, and the expert research that includes encounter situations of ships in an open area in good visibility. It is not clear why the membership functions in Figure 4 are not smooth.

I do not find any new theory being applied to the ship control problem in this chapter. The work dealing with decision making in a fuzzy environment used in this chapter was published in 1970. Lots of progress has been made by several researchers on this subject [1,2,3,4,5]. In the chapter, no mention has been made of these important works. About 50 percent of the references cited in the paper were published in Polish.

More care should have been taken while planning and preparing the chapter. The notation is not clear, lacks consistency, and includes some undefined terms. The notation in the equations and the figures does not match. The usual practice in control theory is for all vector quantities to be shown with boldface letters, while components (scalars) are shown with single stroke letters. Since standard notation is not followed, readers will have some difficulty understanding the contents. The multi-stage control problem can be studied using different methods like dynamic programming and theory of graphs. Section 6 contains almost no significant useful information. Simulation results are presented in section 7, with absolutely no explanation as to how they were determined. The chapter also lacks a problem statement of multi-stage ship control, details of the actual methodology followed to arrive at the results, and detailed discussions. It seems as if it is a trade secret.

Usually, references are given in a standard format, including the names of authors, the year, the title of the item, the name of the journal or publisher, and the volume, issue, and page numbers. Some of these components are missing in the given references. In a nutshell, the reader has to struggle to understand this chapter.