Uncertainty-Aware Visualization and Safety Assessment for Maritime Route Planning

Uncertainty in bathymetric data poses a critical challenge for safe marine navigation, yet dedicated systems provide limited support for visualizing and incorporating uncertainty into automated safety checks. The route safety checker in Electronic Chart Display and Information Systems (ECDIS) searches for dangers along a planned track but relies on fixed buffers and charted depths alone, ignoring horizontal and vertical uncertainty. As a result, hazards may be missed or irrelevant features flagged, leading to insufficiently evaluated routes and increased cognitive workload. This study introduces two alternatives, Track and Hazard, to visualize and incorporate uncertainty into safety checks. These are compared to the ECDIS functionality in a controlled experiment with 96 professional mariners. Results show that Track and Hazard reduced error rates and response times, whereas ECDIS produces more errors and higher workload. Statistical analyses confirm significant differences, and post-experiment surveys reveal strong user preference for the proposed methods in both passage planning and monitoring. By embedding uncertainty directly into safety-check algorithms and visualizing hazards efficiently, the proposed approaches support faster and more reliable navigation decisions. Beyond navigation, they demonstrate how uncertainty visualization can enhance operational decision-support, offering a model for systems where safety depends on rapid and context-aware risk evaluation.