  Research on vessel automation and autonomy is currently being conducted by
various countries and institutions. Safe and accurate ship control algorithms
are crucial to realize automated operation. Actuator drive constraints of a
target ship may jeopardize the stability of the control law and require complex
theory. In this study, we include a penalty term to the control law gain
optimization stage of dynamic positioning systems to account for the amounts by
which the actuator input value and its rate of change exceed the constraint.
The parameters for generating a suitable reference path for the control law are
identified simultaneously with the control gains. The simulation results show
that the proposed method can realize control parameters and a reference design
with excellent tracking performance while determining the cost of the
controller design by considering the effects of both the actuators and rate
saturation.
