Abstract
Maritime transportation is an economic form of mass transportation, but it is associated with significant energy consumption and pollutant emissions. External forces such as tidal currents, waves, and wind strongly influence the energy efficiency of ships. The effective management of external forces can save energy and reduce emissions. This study presents a method to build an optimal speed adjustment plan for a ship to navigate a given route. The method takes a dynamic programming (DP)-based approach to finding such an optimal plan to utilize external forces. To estimate the speed changes caused by external forces, the proposed method uses the mapping information from a combined database of ship status, marine environmental conditions, and speed changes. For the efficient manipulation of externally forced speed-change information, we used MapReduce-based operations that can handle big data and support the easy retrieval of associated data in specific situations. To evaluate the applicability of the proposed method, we applied it to real navigation situations in the southwestern sea of the Korean Peninsula. In the simulation experiments, we used real automatic identification system data and marine environmental data. The proposed method built more efficient speed adjustment plans than the fixed-speed navigation in terms of energy savings and pollutant emission reduction. The results also showed that the speed adjustment exploits external forces in a beneficial manner.
Highlights
Maritime transportation has played an important role in international goods transportation.Large ships have a massive load capacity and consume large amounts of fossil fuels to operate [1].High energy consumption entails high pollutant emissions that have adverse impacts on the marine and atmospheric environment and on public health [2]
To determine an optimal speed adjustment plan, we propose a dynamic programming (DP)-based method that examines all possible adjustment plans under imposed constraints
We propose a DP-based method that recommends optimal speed adjustment plans for navigation routes in response to external forces, unlike the conventional navigation systems
Summary
Maritime transportation has played an important role in international goods transportation. A route change or an adjustment is not an option to save energy and reduce emissions, which makes speed adjustment on navigation routes necessary. Marine environmental conditions such as tidal currents, waves, and wind greatly affect navigation speeds, as external forces either in a friendly or an aggressive manner assist or block a ship’s navigation. The proposed DP-based method can determine an optimal speed-change plan for voyages for which there are sufficient AIS and marine environmental data. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents the related work for route optimization, and Section 3 presents a MapReduce-based processing method to estimate the externally forced speed changes.
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