Autonomy in the domain of waterway transportation represents a novel direction of development, aiming to achieve autonomous responsiveness and computation of tasks within waterway transportation systems. This constitutes the foundational issue for realizing autonomous operations within such systems. Consequently, this paper proposes an approach to demand-service-function autonomous responsiveness tailored for waterway transportation systems. Initially, a semantic model of demand, service, and functional elements within waterway transportation systems is constructed leveraging ontology tools. Subsequently, a demand-service-function autonomous responsiveness model is proposed, integrating intent, contextual logic, and Quality of Service (QoS) assurance. This model facilitates a primary mapping from transportation demands to system services through intent matching, followed by a secondary mapping from system services to object functionalities via contextual semantic logic and QoS assurance semantic matching. Finally, employing autonomous berthing of intelligent vessels as a case study, this paper elucidates the autonomous responsiveness approach. The simulation results show that the proposed method can complete the autonomous response of demand-service-function of the waterway transportation system. Compared with the service template matching method and heuristic automatic matching method, the demand response time and function mapping accuracy are improved, which verifies the effectiveness and accuracy of the autonomous response method. At the same time, it can realize the autonomous response of large-scale services, thus improving the autonomy of the waterway transportation system.