Cost Effective Operation of a Hybrid Zero-Emission Ferry Ship

In this paper, optimal energy management of a zero-emission ferry ship is studied. Fuel cells are considered as the main energy resources of the ship. Solar energy, batteries, and cold-ironing are also used as auxiliary energy resources. Non-linearity in the efficiency of the fuel cells is estimated using piecewise linear models. A mixed-integer linear programming method is applied to model the optimal energy management problem of the ship. Moreover, model predictive control approach is applied to update control parameters in the model and provide the ability of adapting the energy management system with forecast updates. The effectiveness of the proposed method is investigated through an actual case study. The analysis results demonstrate that the proposed method is able to consider different operation aspects of the zero-emission ferry ship effectively. GAMS software is used to solve the optimization problem.