Ship route and speed multi-objective optimization considering weather conditions and emission control area regulations

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to design a route and speed optimization method to simultaneously reduce sailing cost and time, considering Emission Control Areas (ECAs) regulations and weather conditions. To solve it, the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA-II) was used to find the Pareto-optimal set, and the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) was used to find the trade-off solution from the Pareto-optimal set. The proposed model was then applied to a service route around the US Coast, based on different fuel prices in ECAs. The results show that the proposed method can reduce the total sailing cost and time compared with other methods, and can help shipping companies effectively cope with fuel price fluctuations. Moreover, we also determined the best time interval for changing ship route and speed in terms of minimizing the sailing cost.

KEYWORDS:

• Multi-objective optimization
• route and speed plan
• sailing cost and time
• weather conditions
• emission control area

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation (LR19F030002), National Natural Science Foundation of China (61773337 and 61773338), MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences (17YJCZH124), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2018QNA4050), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China for Excellent Young Scholars (61722113).