Prediction of Fuel Consumption for Enroute Ship Based on Machine Learning

Due to the hike in fuel price and environmental awareness by the International Maritime Organization, more attention has been given in order to optimize the fuel consumption of ships. The capability to predict the fuel consumption of ships plays a significant role in the optimization process. To date, most research on predicting ship fuel consumption did not consider marine environmental factors such as wind, wave, current, and etc. Furthermore, traditional statistical methods on predicting ship fuel consumption have low accuracy. In this paper, two different sets of data showing the fuel consumption of a voyage ship with and without the influence of marine environmental factors were obtained. The Back-Propagation Neural Network (BPNN) and Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) techniques in machine learning were used to train and predict the two datasets. Thereafter, the predictive performance of these two techniques was compared and analyzed. Results showed that both techniques were able to accurately predict the ship fuel consumption, especially on the dataset with the influence of marine environmental factors. Quantitatively, the mean prediction accuracy for GPR (mean R
²
= 0.9887) is slightly higher than BPNN (mean R
²
= 0.9817). However, GPR requires longer runtime (mean T = 2236.4 s) compared to BPNN (mean T = 14.7 s). Due to the longer runtime, GPR is less preferable for online and real-time prediction of enroute ship fuel consumption. The ship real-time fuel consumption data can be accurately predicted by machine learning, which will be beneficial to achieve the goal of ship fuel consumption optimization and greenhouse gas emission reduction in the future.