State-of-the-Art Within Ship Weather Routing

Abstract

Increased fuel prices and public awareness of environment impacts from shipping have attracted large efforts in maritime sector to increase its energy efficiency as a factor of competitiveness. Weather routing has become a recognized measure, which can partly help to achieve the targets as well as enhancing safety. A routing system requires a reliable optimization algorithm to consider a ship’s operational costs, expected time of arrival, and cargo safety etc. simultaneously. Hence, the service provided by a weather routing system is highly dependent on a properly selected optimization algorithm and associated input parameters. In this paper the concept of weather routing is broken down into many elements for further analysis. Focus is given to algorithms, constraints and weather forecasts used in the optimized routing plan. Two different aspects of state-of-the-art have been considered. The first is a study of software already in use and the second is a study of methods investigated in the research community. Furthermore, this paper also provides examples of development trends, for example the fatigue based routing, and the risk based routing, as well as its integration with onboard monitoring systems for more reliable weather and ship specific response information.