ABSTRACT
There exist numerous examples of ship domains that are rooted in the concept of Fujii and Goodwin. However, over the years, the applicability of the conception has been significantly expanded. Nowadays, the ship domain is mainly used to assess the safety of navigation, not to evaluate the capacity of waterways as it was initially designed. In the safety-related approach, violation of domain in vessels encounter is recognized as an unsafe operation. Nevertheless, in the literature, there is a lack of proper justification for transferring the ship domain concept from the original application filed to the other, especially into the safety-critical areas. Therefore, in this paper, we undertake an attempt to specify the basic requirements for a concept that can be used to evaluate the safety of ship-ship encounter. The idea reflects the dynamics of two vessels involved in the close approach situation, their maneuvering, and operational characteristics.
