Ship Routing Using Ensemble Forecasts

The establishment of land based routing services, with access to large computational power in terms of computer clusters or cloud solutions, will allow for the use of significantly better and more extensive input data than what is possible with on-board systems. The purpose of this work is to investigate the prospect of utilizing the fairly novel approach of ensemble prediction systems (EPS) for improved treatment of weather forecast uncertainties in ship routing services. A brief literature survey has clearly shown that very little has been done in this area, and the work therefore has a large potential to contribute to improving the routing techniques. The utilization of extended inputs regarding wave spectra, ocean currents, probabilistic models for ship loading conditions, ship performance, and ship dynamics, and the handling of the relevant optimization constraints, will also be investigated. Among possible sub-studies to address are for example the problem of efficient interpolation techniques to minimize the loss of energy in both spatial and time interpolation of forecast data in the mesh. The work will be performed as a research project at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology and will include knowledge and method development and systematic simulations to assess the capabilities in the developed methods in ship routing for improved economic and environmental performance.