Energy efficientship operation through speed optimisation in various weather conditions

Room 235

Speed optimisation or speed management has been an attractive topic in shipping industry for a long time. Traditional methods just rely on master’s experience. Even some recent methods only simply make a speed up or reduction with a certain speed steps to see the benefits, which cannot get optimum speed profile. This paper introduces a relatively advanced method for speed global optimisation towards energy efficient shipping in various weather conditions and shows the effect when the method is employed. With this method, if a ship type, departure and destination ports and fixed ETA (Estimated Time Arrival) are given, the stakeholders can be provided a more reasonable speed operation plan for a certain commercial route, which leads to lower fuel consumption. Weather conditions and hence routing plays a very important role in this process. Several case studies over quite different routes and different voyage season are followed to validate the method.