Ocean monitoring

DANAOS Shipping is one of the largest managers of modern, large-size containerships voyaging through the open seas, planning trips that last many weeks. EO4EU aims to limit the solution space and increase the throughput reducing the computational time. Such an approach will have a positive impact on ships travelling, towards their destination, as it will limit the time of the optimised route. For testing purposes, two vessels of Danaos

Shipping deployed in long distance liner services will be engaged. The whole process is described in the following steps/phases:

1. Phase 1: Before vessel departure the navigational Officer on board plots a voyage plan. Then synchronisation of the on-board version with the main optimization engine ashore allows continuous monitoring and update of Master’s route plotting decisions along the voyage and any deviation from the initial plan. Routing advice is sent back to the vessel where the Master is able to visualise the optimised route with respect to the forecasted weather en route.
2. Phase 2: Post voyage route assessment. At the end of the voyage performance results will be displayed (travel time, consumption, average speed, etc.) while a voyage performance comparison will be triggered between the actual route, driven by the master’s decision, and the system’s route advice baseline. Both routes will be fed with real weather data and will be assessed against actual voyage conditions.  

Challenge

Optimal Weather Routing is an NP-hard problem. The International Maritime Organization (IMO) recognizes that weather routing must be available to shipping in the form of recommended “optimum routes” for individual crossings of the oceans. Practice of weather routing has proved of benefit to ship operations and safety as well as to their crews and cargoes. Hence, for substantially large routes (e.g., trans-Atlantic), the computational time may even reach 20-30 mins per run. Hence, even a small increase in granularity (i.e., one point every 0.5 degrees) may lead to computational times that exceed an hour, which is unacceptable for the standards set for the service.

Solution

EO4EU aims to enhance the quality of information and the optimization method so as to produce better analysis results and more efficient routes in terms of fuel consumption, safety and arrival time precision. DANAOS plans on integrating the EO4EU capability of handling extreme volumes of data by fusing the meteorological data collected from EO data sources and a vessel to perform route optimization during the voyage of the ship. A common model will integrate a fine grained weather report as close as the ship is en route to produce more accurate results. The existing data-driven methods will benefit from the modular and powerful architecture of EO4EU delivering extreme analytics over the collected meteorological data to reveal the hidden patterns and correlations between meteorological features/parameters. DANAOS envisages to define complex analytical queries based on the possible combinations of meteorological data adopting a high number of features, thus, to fully expose their effects in designing alternative routes.

Current status

DANAOS web-integrated Data Analytics and Maritime Solutions suite (WAVES), entails a novel Weather Routing Optimization module that combines the vast amount of operational data collected from on-board sensor installments, with weather data acquired from NOOA in a consolidated approach, to derive an alternative, optimal route, in terms of efficiency (fuel oil consumption), safety (avoid severe weather conditions), rule and environmental compliance (charter party agreements, emissions reduction (CII, EEOI*)). DANAOS aims to extend the aforementioned module, by incorporating an enriched and more granular weather feature set that will vastly optimize the core of the weather routing algorithm with the inclusion of refined probabilistic weather forecast models and additional parameters able to unveil important relationships between the weather and the operational state of the ship. Furthermore exploiting core functionalities of the EO4EU platform, concerning data interoperability and processing we envisage to refine the Weather Routing module in terms of computational cost, inference time and overhead management.

* Environmental co.mpliance indicators referenced in regulatory framework reports (e.g. IMO )

CII: Carbon Intensity Indicator

EEOI: Energy Efficiency Operational Index

EO4EU will offer enhanced visualization capacity of the data obtained both by the open EO sources as well as the in Situ data collected by DANAOS, offering a multi-layer interaction with the user onboard, while augment user-friendliness and responsiveness.