Liner sailing speed optimization considering wind and waves

Abstract

This paper proposes a new sailing speed optimization problem considering sea conditions such as wind and waves for a container shipping company. Since wind and waves, as exterior factors, can reduce speed, more power is employed as compensation to maintain regular service frequency and avoid delay, resulting in additional bunker consumption and higher cost. Hence, it is necessary to optimize the sailing speed according to the wind and waves. A power model was built to determine the reduced speed caused by the wind and waves for quantifying the speed reduction. On the basis of the proposed model, we developed a mixed-integer nonlinear programming model for a sailing speed optimization problem considering the wind and waves. In view of the complexity of the function for determining the speed reduction, a discrete method is proposed to transform the proposed mixed-integer nonlinear programming model into a mixed-integer linear programming model. Finally, a numerical experiment was conducted to verify and validate the applicability.