A genetic algorithm for finding realistic sea routes considering the weather
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A genetic algorithm for finding realistic sea routes considering the weather Stefan Kuhlemann1,2
· Kevin Tierney1
Received: 29 January 2019 / Revised: 9 July 2020 / Accepted: 11 July 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The weather has a major impact on the profitability, safety, and environmental sustainability of the routes sailed by seagoing vessels. The prevailing weather strongly influences the course of routes, affecting not only the safety of the crew, but also the fuel consumption and therefore the emissions of the vessel. Effective decision support is required to plan the route and the speed of the vessel considering the forecasted weather. We implement a genetic algorithm to minimize the fuel consumption of a vessel taking into account the two most important influences of weather on a ship: the wind and the waves. Our approach assists route planners in finding cost minimal routes that consider the weather, avoid specified areas, and meet arrival time constraints. Furthermore, it supports ship speed control to avoid areas with weather conditions that would result in high fuel costs or risk the safety of the vessel. The algorithm is evaluated for a variety of instances to show the impact of weather routing on the routes and the fuel and travel time savings that can be achieved with our approach. Including weather into the routing leads to a savings potential of over 10% of the fuel consumption. We show that ignoring the weather when constructing routes can lead to routes that cannot be sailed in practice. Furthermore, we evaluate our algorithm with stochastic weather data to show that it can provide high-quality routes under real conditions even with uncertain weather forecasts. Keywords Weather routing · Ship routing · Genetic algorithm · Uncertain weather
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Stefan Kuhlemann [email protected] Kevin Tierney [email protected]
1
Universität Bielefeld, Universitätsstraße 25, 33615 Bielefeld, Germany
2
Universität Paderborn, Warburger Str. 100, 33098 Paderborn, Germany
123
S. Kuhlemann et al.
1 Introduction Adverse weather conditions pose a significant danger to ships, their crews, passengers, and cargo and represents one of the main causes of delays in the shipping industry (Notteboom 2006). Since over 90% of the world trade is carried by ships (Hoffmann and Sirimanne 2017), considering the weather when finding safe and efficient routes for ships is of utmost importance. Furthermore, finding good routes for ships lowers fuel consumption, leading to lower CO2 emissions. Finding routes that are not only safe and efficient, but also ensure that the ship arrives on time is a complex task that is difficult to do by hand, especially when considering the weather. In this paper, we present an approach for finding routes between two points on the globe considering the current weather along the route. For this, we use a real-coded genetic algorithm (GA) with specialized mutation and crossover operators for the weather routing of ships. Our goal is to minimize the fuel consumption
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