Over the past seventy years many advances have been made in the field of ship control. Early developments by Sperry and Minorsky on proportional controllers have led to today's modern control systems which have interfacing capabilities with position fixing equipment.
This paper presents a brief historical summary of the methods employed in ship control from early proportional devices through the range of adaptive systems and concludes with details of a possible future control method known as intelligent control.
Intelligent control consists of three methodologies: expert, fuzzy and neural. An investigation and comparison of the methodologies will present possible future control strategies.
