On using density maps for the calculation of ship routes

Abstract

This paper presents a research on the calculation of short- to mid-range ship routes that are based on density maps derived by previous historical locations of liner or merchant ships. Two main approaches are presented. In the first one, the route finding problem is formulated as an evolutionary-optimization problem. In the second one, a modified A* algorithm is presented, which is able to handle density data and smoothing requirements. Both methods are able to calculate accurate and smooth ship routes that comply with exiting density data of common sea paths. A combination of both methods is also presented for deriving smooth ship routes that comply with density data without the need for post processing. Several examples are presented and discussed to illustrate the effectiveness and the performance of all proposed methods.