Overview
There is a strong interest in the maritime community to optimise sailing time (expected time of arrival), reduce fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions and minimise maintenance cost.
The objective of this project is to develop a sail planning system to help sea masters optimise these criteria. The proposed solution will mimic the current human sail planning process.
The project used ship specific data collection and real-time local and remote observations (3D-radar, Earth Observation data, etc.) combined with several state-of-the-art nowcast and forecast numerical models. It monitored actual ship performance and assimilated this information in the sail plan optimisation process.
The access and systematic exploitation of this ground truth information will provide the unique capability of building 'system experience', constantly improving the performance of different sub-models used in the sail plan optimiser. This will also reduce the sensitivity to ocean and weather forecast errors.
The system will automatically and continuously compute and communicate optimized sail plans to a vessel. All relevant information justifying the results will be sent simultaneously (as for example a storm system, dangerous wave zones, security and other relevant information). The execution of the NAVTRONIC system requires a central information centre that will be realised for exchanging ship relevant information and providing optimised real-time sail plans. The central information centre will be part of the GRID distributed processing reciprocity. The NAVTRONIC project is highly end-user driven. The largest market players in the maritime community are member of the consortium and support the project with human resources, vessels and infrastructures for tests and evaluations.
Funding
Results
During the NAVTRONIC project the following was achieved:
- A comparison has been made of the accuracy and efficiency of different methods - both automatic and manual - for sea/ice state recognition in satellite, aircraft, ground based and ship sensor systems.
- A harmonised global reporting system for sea/ice state has been developed.
- The improved sea route optimisation and have come to understand the value of archiving observations in order to establish statistically robust information on sea/ice states in dominant shipping routes.
- A methodology has been developed and applied for determining the fraction of hazardous sea/ice states that are likely to cause ship incidents in environmentally sensitive coastlines and biological resources.
- They derived reliable, seasonal, sea/ice state indicators and statistics for the World Seas.
- The potential value of the near-real time support of satellite, airborne, ground and ship based sea/ice state observations for ship operations has been evaluated.
- They defined a utility function combining speed, safety, environmental protection, minimum fuel consumption and just in time arrival for use in route optimisation, and integrated this with state-of-the-art hydrodynamics analysis of the specific ships.
- A quality function combining geophysical observational quality, temporal and spatial sampling density has been developed and integrated with a ship’s sail plan and a ship’s own geophysical observation.
Strategy targets
Innovating for the future (technology and behaviour): Promoting more sustainable development