An Economic Ship Routing System by Optimizing Outputs of Engine-Power based on an Evolutionary Strategy

An economic ship routing means to sail a ship with a goal of minimizing the fuel consumption by utilizing weather forecast information, and many such systems have been recently developed. Most of them assume that sailing is carried out with a constraint like a fixed output of engine-power or a fixed sailing speed. However, if the output of engine-power is controlled, it is possible to reduce the fuel consumption by sailing a ship under a relatively good weather condition. In this paper, we propose a novel economic ship routing system which can search optimal outputs of the engine-power for each part of a path by employing an evolutionary strategy. In addition, we develope an algorithm to find the shortest path and a method to enhance the degree of curve representation. These make the proposed system applicable to an arbitrary pair of departure and destination points. We compared our proposed system with another existing system not controlling output of the engine-power over 36 scenarios in total, and observed that the former reduced the estimated fuel consumption than the latter by 1.3% on average and the maximum 5.6% with little difference of estimated time of arrival.