Waterborne transport faces challenges such as increasing volume, higher environmental requirements and more serious shortage of seafarers in the future. Intelligent vessels, which means that they can comprehend the surroundings and figure out what to do autonomously, could relieve these challenges. However, currently there are few applications of intelligent vessels for civilization use. On the other hand, a variety of technologies has been applied successfully for military or environmental use vessels. This paper summarizes the general architecture of an intelligent vessel based on the existing Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) and then focuses on the internal algorithmic techniques when representing such a vessel as a hierarchical system, from multi-source data fusion, path planning to low level motion control. Alongside, cooperative vessel formation control is briefly reviewed. Then, translation of the theories, algorithms and applications in these fields to the domain of intelligent transportation vessels is discussed. Possible directions for future research in intelligent transport vessels are outlined.