Abstract
The determination of the appropriate operational profile of a ship through the adjustment of its sailing speed can potentially present a fruitful prospect in the effort towards the maximization of energy resources exploitation in commercial ships. The dependency of fuel consumption on speed, always in inseparable conjunction with the ever-changing weather conditions prevailing over any specified route, leads to the formulation of a (from mathematical point of view) not well-defined problem, when practical considerations regarding the capabilities of currently available weather forecast services are taken into account. In the present work, a method for the dynamic determination of optimal ship speed, in a fixed route, is proposed. Within this method, the problem of deteriorating accuracy of weather predictions for relatively long time periods is addressed with the segmentation of the route's total time horizon in smaller time periods, in order for solvable and meaningful optimization problems to be formulated. The interdependency between the individual sub-problems is established and examined with the definition of appropriate method parameters, which are representative of the most important time scales of the engineering problem at hand. The effectiveness of the method is demonstrated with the application on an actual container ship route.
Published Version
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