Consumption and Emission Minimised Ship Manoeuvring

The paper presents an approach to increase the efficiency of shipping by reducing the fuel consumption and emissions. The approach is based on two combined ship-specific models, one for the dynamic motion behaviour resulting from the application of the actuators under the current environmental conditions and the other one for the associated thermodynamic processes of engines. The measurement data from previous crossings were analysed with the newly developed software tool ShiBDAT, which processes the data from the engine control room and the voyage data recorder and calculates further thermodynamic engine values. The systematized results are used to manually optimize the manoeuvring behaviour and to create a manoeuvre plan for the entire ferry crossing according to the environmental conditions. During manual ship handling, this manoeuvre plan is superimposed on the electronic navigation chart in the institute's own manoeuvre assistance system. In a ship handling simulator, trials were conducted by experienced nautical officers to compare the efficiency of manual manoeuvring with and without auxiliary functionalities. The tests prove that the manoeuvring with the dynamic motion prediction consumes significantly less fuel. The efficiency increases further by the additional application of previously planned manoeuvre sequences. The paper describes the used software tools and the trial results. The transfer of these energy efficient methods to automatic ship operations is outlined.