Study for the development of a weather routing software applied to wind assisted propulsion

Abstract

The goal is to develop an optimization software for the weather routing of a vessel equipped with a wind capture device in order to maximize the fuel savings during the ship operation (on board software).

The study aims to compile the state-of-the-art algorithms in the field of mathematical optimisation that will form the basis for a further development of an on-board Weather Routing software applied to Wind Assisted Propulsion. The development of the software will assess the technical feasibility of a future commercial program of these characteristics, which is subject to demanding requirements mostly derived from its use in real time. As a consequence of the conducted research into Weather Routing and pathfinding algorithms, the problem was identified as a multi-objective optimisation task. Thus, the Engine Use Strategy concept is employed as preferences structure to be used in an a priori method to find the preferred solution within the Pareto frontier. The method proposed constitute a novel adaptation of Dijkstra’s algorithm to the Weather Routing particulars, oriented to maximise the computation performance of the algorithm through the integration of the intrinsic directionality of the Weather Routing problem. Once the algorithm had been design and programmed, a set of ancillary tools and routines were developed, including a weather forecast processing code and a Velocity Prediction Program. Finally, the entire program was tested and its performance assessed. In order to outline the business opportunities of a future commercial version of the software, a brief case study was conducted. The main finding of the latter was the promising results of the savings improvement offered by the software in some of the simulated cases. However, the considerable variability of the results urged for further analysis to be undertaken.