How Far from the Shore? Federated Maritime Intelligence for Autonomous Ship and Harbor Maneuvering

Autonomous ship maneuvering in harbor environments is increasingly supported by advances in model predictive control, reinforcement learning, digital twins, multi-sensor fusion, berth allocation, and multi-agent coordination. However, these developments are often studied as separate technological domains, while real harbor autonomy requires coordinated operation across vessels, port infrastructure, regulatory systems, cybersecurity mechanisms, and human supervisory processes. This study presents an architecture-oriented critical review of autonomous ship and harbor maneuvering research published between 2015 and May 2026. The review synthesizes literature from control engineering, maritime artificial intelligence, sensor fusion, digital twins, port logistics, cyber-physical systems, regulation, cybersecurity, and human–AI supervision. The analysis introduces two conceptual contributions: a layered cyber-physical taxonomy and an integration maturity model. The taxonomy organizes autonomous harbor maneuvering into seven interdependent layers: physical dynamics, perception and sensor fusion, prediction and state estimation, control, decision and coordination, digital twin federation, and regulatory–supervisory governance. The maturity model distinguishes isolated vessel autonomy, assisted coordination, shared digital synchronization, agent-based coordination, and fully federated maritime cyber-physical autonomy. The reviewed evidence shows substantial progress in individual layers, especially control, perception, digital twins, and berth allocation. However, major gaps remain in cross-layer synchronization, semantic interoperability, regulation-aware decision-making, cybersecurity integration, and validated ship–shore federation. To address these gaps, this study proposes a Federated Maritime Cyber-Physical Architecture for autonomous harbor maneuvering. The architecture integrates vessel autonomy cores, port intelligence cores, semantic federation middleware, agent-based negotiation, regulatory verification, cybersecurity safeguards, and human supervisory interfaces. This review argues that future progress in autonomous harbor operations depends not only on stronger algorithms, but on interoperable, explainable, regulation-aware, and cyber-resilient ship–shore ecosystems.