Investigation on a Novel Support System for Automatic Ship Berthing in Marine Practice
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
In this paper, the author developed a support system of automatic berthing with fuzzy controllers. I guess this manuscript is understandable and well-written. I recommend the paper will be published in Journal of Marine Science and Engineering. But I would like to require the author to demonstrate numerical berthing experiments in a more efficient way.
Comments:
I found author’s recent publication in Future Internet (Nguyen 2019). The mathematical model with ship parameters used in this study is mostly same as used in the author’s previous paper. I could find differences between them; however, it is better to refer the previous one and clarify the difference.
In Section 4, three berthing cases were demonstrated, and all the cases were successful for berthing. I could understand the results and description. But I could find neither significant differences in these three experimental setting nor useful discussion. Readers will efficiently understand the performance of the developed system when the author clarify difference in the initial conditions with expected problems before berthing. For example:
1. Initial position is fixed (e.g., positive in x). Compare the results when larger or smaller u (1.2.), larger or smaller r (1.3.).
2. Initial position is fixed (e.g., negative in x). Compare the results when larger or smaller u (2.2.), larger or smaller r (2.3.).
Experimental setting using table may be useful, as well.
Reference
Nguyen, V.S., Research on a Support System for Automatic Ship Navigation in Fairway, Future Internet, 2019, 11(2), 38.
Author Response
Thank you very much and best wish to you, Professor !
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
The manuscript presents a support system to bring the ship into berth automatically based on three fuzzy controllers. Numerical simulations are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed controllers. The topic of this article is of scientific interest and could contribute to the current state of the art. However, the manuscript is not ready for publication and requires substantial improvements. Other than technical improvements described below, the article includes numerous mistakes which makes it very difficult for the reader to follow and understand. For example, the authors frequently refer to citations that are not included in the manuscript. The text refers to references like [34], while only 10 references are listed at the end of the manuscript. Additionally, the text is full of grammatical mistakes and needs to go through intensive writing improvements. The major technical comments/revision requirements are: 1) Section 2 describes a mathematical model for ship dynamic simulations. However, details of the numerical solver are missing. If the authors used an established solver, they need to reference the publications that show the validity of the solver. If the solver development was a part of this research, details about the numerical models need to be included and the accuracy of the model implementation needs to be proved. Without confidence in the numerical solver, the conclusions in this paper will not be supported. 2) Similarly, no details are provided for implementing the fuzzy controllers described in the paper. 3) The authors need to discuss the challenges in coupling the maneuvering solver with the fuzzy controllers they have developed. Stability issues, convergence strategies, and time-step requirements are examples that should be discussed for the current time-dependent simulations. To summarize, I believe that the manuscript is not acceptable for publication. Extensive improvements and revisions are needed, including technical discussion improvements as well as careful re-writing of the manuscript for the English language.
Author Response
Thank you very much and best wish to you, Professor !
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
Thanks for considering the provided comments to improve your manuscript. Please perform final editing of the English language and style before publication.
