Ocean Mesh Grid: Applications in Shipping Modeling

Many maritime transportation applications in operations research and analytics require computation of the shortest distance (or time) between two arbitrary positions on the ocean. In this paper, we show how “object meshing” used in engineering applications can be applied to provide a network over the ocean that enables such computation. We present a short description of potential applications in shipping modeling as well as a comparison of computational accuracy with an established port-to-port marine distance table. The numerical results suggest that a shortest-path algorithm applied to our network approximation of the ocean surface performs well for longer distances but relatively poorly for short voyages.