Even with the abundance of navigation aids, marine traffic collisions are still happening, mostly due to human errors in controlling the ship. This work is a structured study on the integration of traffic observing and route planning techniques with the utmost aim of providing an automatic tool for the ship officer in determining the optimal collision avoiding strategy in all prevailing traffic conditions at sea, taking into account marine traffic regulations. Apart from traditional traffic observing methods by marine radar and the Automatic Identification System (AIS), a surveillance system...