Despite the fact that shipping is such an efficient form of transport, it still accounts for ~2% of world emissions. With 50,000+ commercial vessels operating in our ocean’s there is plenty of room to improve the efficiency of these vessels to help our planet. This view is supported by shipping’s regulators and there is increasing legislative pressure to reduce greenhouse gases emissions. This increase in legislation is in combination with the increase in the cost of compliant fuels and has led to a high demand for solutions to reduce fuel-consumption of commercial vessels.

Therefore, Dr Adam Sobey and Dr Przemyslaw Grudniewski from the Maritime Engineering group at the University of Southampton have partnered with Theyr ltd to create an efficient voyage optimisation solution for commercial vessels. The project will focus on combining real-time high-fidelity met-ocean data, provided by Theyr ltd, with a world-leading Genetic Algorithm, developed previously by Dr Sobey and Dr Grudniewski. This will increase the robustness and effectiveness of voyage planning, allowing vessels to avoid poor weather and travel at efficient speeds to reduce greenhouse gases emissions.

The project is funded by a grant from the £4.8 million SPRINT program (SPace Research and Innovation Network for Technology), which was developed to help merge commercial data and technologies with innovative university research.  Furthermore, it is planned to utilise the IRDIS 5 supercomputer, the UK’s largest academic supercomputer located in University of Southampton, to accelerate the verification process. We hope a number of student projects will be developed in parallel to this research to help the team solve these challenging issues and provide creative solutions to provide real world impact.

Further details can be found in the trade and engineering press: Freightcomms,  SHIP Technology, Vessel Performance Optimisation and the May 2020 issue of the Naval Architect, published by the Royal Institute of Naval Architects.