Robust Pareto – Optimum Routing of Ships
utilizing
Deterministic and Ensemble Weather Forecasts
vorgelegt von
Diplom-Ingenieur
Jörn Hinnenthal
aus Berlin
von der Fakultät V – Verkehrs- und Maschinensysteme
der Technischen Universität Berlin
zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades
Doktor der Ingenieurwissenschaften
– Dr.-Ing. –
genehmigte Dissertation
Promotionsausschuss:
Vorsitzender: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jürgen Siegmann
Berichter: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Günther F. Clauss
Berichter: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Apostolos D. Papanikolaou
Tag der wissenschaftlichen Aussprache: 18.12.2007
Berlin 2008
D 83
Pareto Optimum Ship Routing
Acknowledgement
Inspired by my participation as student assistant in the European research project
SEAROUTES, I decided to continue the research into ship route optimization that I already
started within my diploma thesis. In this regard I owe my deepest gratitude to my promoters
Dr.-Ing. Stefan Harries and Prof. Dr.-Ing. Lothar Birk, who encouraged me to become
scientific assistant and to continue with this work up to a doctoral thesis.
I want to express my gratitude to my promoter and supervisor Prof. Dr.-Ing. Günther Clauss
for his encouragement to publish scientific results, for the outstanding composition of
guidance and freedom, and for generous support whenever I asked for. I also want to express
my gratitude to my second supervisor Prof. Dr.-Ing. Apostolos Papanikolaou for his
instantaneous agreement to contribute in the doctoral committee, and I only regret that I
didn’t involve him much earlier into this work. Also many thanks to the chairman of the
doctoral committee Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jürgen Siegmann for supporting a fast and frictionless
procedure.
Special thanks I owe to my former colleagues Claus Abt, Dr.-Ing. Justus Heimann, and
Henning Winter for reliable support and many fruitful discussions. The same applies to my
present, esteemed, and embosomed colleagues Felix Fliege, Gonzalo Tampier Brockhaus and
Dr.-Ing. Uwe Boettner who built for a long time the core of the workgroup at Technische
Universität Berlin for me, the fundament for the efficiency and the pleasure within my work.
Further on I would like to thank all my colleagues that I not mentioned by name, because they
not directly contributed to this work, I got a lot of support in other projects and found
wonderful companions.
Sincere thanks are given to Dr. Øvind Saetra whom I met within the SEAROUTES project,
who provided me with exquisite weather forecasts, and who inspired me to apply ensemble
forecasts for the routing problem. Sincere thanks are also given to Thor Marquardt, chief
officer at Hapag Lloyd, for his valuable support and consultancy regarding navigation and
operation of ships and basic conditions of maritime transport, and to Dr. Masaru Tsujimoto
from the National Maritime Research Institute in Tokyo, who became an esteemed colleague
during his time in Berlin and who inspired me a lot within our lively discussions on routing.
Special thanks also to Gabriele Schmitz for her excellent high-speed proofreading.
Finally and most of all I would like to express my gratitude to Nicole Reimer, my beloved
wife, who encourages me and believes in me and our partnership, also in times that are
everything else than mellifluous.
Jörn Hinnenthal – Berlin, March 2008
Pareto Optimum Ship Routing
Abstract
Sophisticated routing of ships is increasingly recognized as an important contribution to safe,
reliable, and economic ship operation. The more reliable weather forecasts and performance
simulation of ships in a seaway become, the better they serve to identify the best possible
route in terms of criteria like: ETA (estimated time of arrival), fuel consumption, safety (of
ship, crew, passengers. and cargo), and comfort. This establishes a multi-objective, non-
linear, and constrained optimization problem in which a suitable compromise is to be found
between opposing targets.
For its solution a new optimization approach to select the most advantageous route on the
basis of hydrodynamic simulation and sophisticated weather forecast is posed. Transfer
functions are employed to assess the operating behavior of a ship in waves. Probabilistic
ensemble forecasts, provided by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts
ECMWF, are applied to account for the stochastic behavior of weather. The routes in adverse
weather conditions are established as perturbations of a parent route in calm weather, which is
assumed to be the concatenated great circles between waypoints. Utilizing a B-spline
technique, the number of free variables for describing both the course and the velocity profile
is kept low. For solving the multi-objective, non-linear, and constrained optimization problem
the commercial package modeFRONTIER is successfully applied. In order to balance
opposing criteria and to value the performance of optimized routes an approach suggested by
the Italian economist Vilfredo PARETO is adopted. A multi-objective genetic algorithm turns
out to be a suitable optimization method to identify PARETO optimum routes for a
sustainable support of a conscious decision-making process.
An elaborated example is given for an intercontinental container service, employing the
Panmax container vessel CMS HANNOVER EXPRESS, between Europe and North
America. Different weather situations for the North Atlantic are taken into account.
Sensitivity studies are applied to validate the set-up and to conduct plausibility tests. The
robustness of optimized routes against weather changes, time loss, fuel consumption,
accelerations, slamming, and parametric rolling are taken into account.
Pareto Optimum Ship Routing
Kurzdarstellung
Zur Gewährleistung eines sicheren, zuverlässigen und wirtschaftlichen Schiffsbetriebes
kommen zunehmend Routing-Systeme zur Anwendung. Um sichere Aussagen über die
Reisedauer, den Brennstoffverbrauch, Sicherheit oder auch den Komfort an Bord treffen zu
können, spielen die Zuverlässigkeit von Wettervorhersagen und die der Simulation der
Seegangseigenschaften des Schiffes eine große Rolle. Dieses führt letztlich zu einem nicht-
linearen Optimierungsproblem mit mehreren, oftmals antagonistischen Gütekriterien. Der
Lösungsraum ist zudem durch Nebenbedingungen beschränkt.
Zur Lösung dieser Aufgabe wird ein neu entwickelter Ansatz vorgestellt. Auf Basis von
Bewegungssimulationen des Schiffes im Seegang und detaillierten Seegangsprognosen
werden optimale Kurse und zugehörige Geschwindigkeitsprofile eines Schiffes identifiziert.
Das Betriebsverhalten des Schiffes im Seegang wird dabei mit Hilfe von
Übertragungsfunktionen und Seegangsspektren bestimmt. Zunächst kommen deterministische
Seegangsvorhersagen zum Einsatz; später werden diese durch Ensemble-Vorhersagen
erweitert, um das stochastische Verhalten möglicher Wetterentwicklungen abzubilden. Die
Seegangsprognosen werden vom European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts
ECMWF zur Verfügung gestellt.
Zur Beschreibung von Routenvarianten wird eine Perturbationsmethode verwendet. Sie
basiert auf der Darstellung des Kurses und eines zugehörigen Geschwindigkeitsprofils durch
B-Splines. Für die Lösung der Optimierungsaufgabe kommt die generische Optimierungs-
Software modeFRONTIER zum Einsatz. Zur Bewertung optimierter Routen unter dem
Aspekt sich widersprechender Gütekriterien, wird ein von dem italienischen Ökonomen
Vilfredo PARETO vorgeschlagenes Konzept verwendet. Ein heuristisches Suchverfahren, der
Genetische Algorithmus für mehrere Gütekriterien, zeigt gute Ergebnisse bei der Suche nach
PARETO optimalen Routen, die zur Unterstützung der Routenplanung herangezogen werden
können.
Die neu entwickelte Optimierungsmethode wird am Beispiel eines Containerservices mit der
CMS HANNOVER EXPRESS im Nord Atlantik erläutert. Die Auswirkungen verschiedener
Wetterszenarien auf ein Optimierungsergebnis werden dargestellt. Empfindlichkeits- und
Variationsstudien dienen der Validierung und zur Plausibilitätskontrolle.
Pareto Optimum Ship Routing
iv
Content
Acknowledgement ........................................................................................................i
Abstract .......................................................................................................................ii
Kurzdarstellung........................................................................................................... iii
Content.......................................................................................................................iv
List of Figures.............................................................................................................vi
List of Tables ...............................................................................................................x
Nomenclature .............................................................................................................xi
1 Introduction to weather routing of ships............................................................... 1
1.1 State of the art in applied research ............................................................................................2
1.2 Routing services......................................................................................................................... 8
1.3 A new approach to route optimization...................................................................................... 10
2 Basic principles and terms of optimization......................................................... 12
2.1 SIMPLEX algorithm .................................................................................................................. 14
2.2 Genetic algorithms, GA and MOGA ......................................................................................... 15
3 Modeling of ship route and environmental conditions........................................ 19
3.1 Route description and perturbation .......................................................................................... 19
3.2 Deterministic weather forecast and parametric wave model.................................................... 22
3.3 Ensemble weather forecast...................................................................................................... 24
4 Assessment of ships responses in waves ......................................................... 26
4.1 Ship motion and transfer function............................................................................................. 26
4.2 Statistical evaluation of the ship motion in irregular waves...................................................... 30
4.3 Acceleration on the bridge........................................................................................................ 32
4.4 Slamming.................................................................................................................................. 33
4.5 Fuel consumption and load to the main engine ....................................................................... 35
4.5.1 Determination of the over-all resistance ............................................................................................ 35
4.5.2 Propeller characteristics and operation point ..................................................................................... 37
4.5.3 Feasibility of the operation point of the main engine......................................................................... 39
4.5.4 Specific fuel consumption.................................................................................................................. 40
4.6 Practical calculation of ship responses .................................................................................... 41
4.7 Avoiding irregular frequencies..................................................................................................45
4.8 Add-on for motion sickness incidence...................................................................................... 46
4.9 Add-on for parametric rolling .................................................................................................... 49
4.9.1 Introduction of criteria from the Shin approach.................................................................................49
4.9.2 Additional criteria provided by the Krueger approach....................................................................... 51
4.9.3 Combination of the approaches.......................................................................................................... 54
4.10 Considered ship responses...................................................................................................... 57
Loading more pages...