State-of-the-Art Within Ship Weather Routing

Author(s):  
Martin Hjorth Simonsen ◽  
Erik Larsson ◽  
Wengang Mao ◽  
Jonas W. Ringsberg

Increased fuel prices and public awareness of environment impacts from shipping have attracted large efforts in maritime sector to increase its energy efficiency as a factor of competitiveness. Weather routing has become a recognized measure, which can partly help to achieve the targets as well as enhancing safety. A routing system requires a reliable optimization algorithm to consider a ship’s operational costs, expected time of arrival, and cargo safety etc. simultaneously. Hence, the service provided by a weather routing system is highly dependent on a properly selected optimization algorithm and associated input parameters. In this paper the concept of weather routing is broken down into many elements for further analysis. Focus is given to algorithms, constraints and weather forecasts used in the optimized routing plan. Two different aspects of state-of-the-art have been considered. The first is a study of software already in use and the second is a study of methods investigated in the research community. Furthermore, this paper also provides examples of development trends, for example the fatigue based routing, and the risk based routing, as well as its integration with onboard monitoring systems for more reliable weather and ship specific response information.

Author(s):  
A. Zimmermann ◽  
C. Visscher ◽  
M. Kaltschmitt

AbstractFructans are carbohydrates consisting of fructose monomers linked by β-2,1- and/or β-2,6-glycosidic bonds with linear or branched structure. These carbohydrates belong to the group of prebiotic dietary fibre with health-promoting potential for humans and mammals due to their indigestibility and selective stimulation of microorganisms in the gastrointestinal tract. This makes fructans interesting mainly for healthy food as well as animal feed applications. As a consequence of a growing public awareness for animal welfare, dietary fibre and thus fructans move into the focus as a fibre-rich feeding improving not only animals’ health but also their well-being. Against this background, this paper summarises the known effects of fructans focusing on pigs and highlights the state of the art in fructan production processes from plant material as well as selected current research lines. Additionally, an attempt is made to assess the potential of European fructan production for an application as animal feed. Based on this, challenges in the field of fructan production are addressed and alternative substrates for fructans are discussed and pointed out.


Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Slavisa Tomic ◽  
Marko Beko

This work addresses the problem of target localization in adverse non-line-of-sight (NLOS) environments by using received signal strength (RSS) and time of arrival (TOA) measurements. It is inspired by a recently published work in which authors discuss about a critical distance below and above which employing combined RSS-TOA measurements is inferior to employing RSS-only and TOA-only measurements, respectively. Here, we revise state-of-the-art estimators for the considered target localization problem and study their performance against their counterparts that employ each individual measurement exclusively. It is shown that the hybrid approach is not the best one by default. Thus, we propose a simple heuristic approach to choose the best measurement for each link, and we show that it can enhance the performance of an estimator. The new approach implicitly relies on the concept of the critical distance, but does not assume certain link parameters as given. Our simulations corroborate with findings available in the literature for line-of-sight (LOS) to a certain extent, but they indicate that more work is required for NLOS environments. Moreover, they show that the heuristic approach works well, matching or even improving the performance of the best fixed choice in all considered scenarios.


Author(s):  
Roshamida Abd Jamil ◽  
Jean-Christophe Gilloteaux ◽  
Philippe Lelong ◽  
Aurélien Babarit

Abstract The energy ship concept has been proposed as an alternative wind power conversion system to harvest offshore wind energy. Energy ships are ships propelled by the wind and which generate electricity by means of water turbines attached underneath their hull, The generated electricity is stored on-board (batteries, hydrogen, etc.) It has been shown that energy ships deployed far-offshore in the North Atlantic Ocean may achieve capacity factors over 80% using weather-routing. The present paper complements this research by investigating the capacity factors of energy ships harvesting wind power in the near-shore. Two case studies are considered: the French islands of Saint-Pierre et-Miquelon, near Canada, and Ile de Sein, near metropolitan France. The methodology is as follows. First, the design of the energy ship considered in this study is presented. It was developed using an in-house Velocity, and Power Performance Program (VPPP) developed at LHEEA. The velocity and power production polar plots of the ship were used as input to a modified version of the weather-routing software QtVlm. This software was then used for capacity factor optimization using 10m altitude wind data analysis which was extracted from the ERA-Interim dataset provided by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). Three years (2015, 2016, and 2017) data are considered. The results show that average capacity factors of approximately 40% and 40% can be achieved at Ile de Sein and Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon with considered energy ship design.


Author(s):  
Stevo Lukić ◽  
Mirjana Simić

Non-Line-Of-Sight conditions pose a major challenge to cellular radio positioning. Such conditions, when the direct Line-Of-Sight path is blocked, result in additional propagation delay for the signal, additional attenuation, and an angular bias. Therefore,many researchers have proposed various algorithms to mitigate the measured error caused by this phenomenon. This paper presentsthe procedure for improving accuracy of determining the mobile station location in cellular radio networks in Non-Line-of-Sightpropagation environment, based on the Time Of Arrival oriented estimator using the Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm. Incomputer science, Particle Swarm Optimization is an evolutionary computational method that optimizes a problem by iteratively tryingto improve a candidate solution with regard to a given measure of quality. The proposed algorithm uses the repeating Time-Of-Arrivaltest measurements using the four base stations and for simulation selects the measurement combination that give the smallest regionenclosed by the overlap of four circles. In this way, the smallest intersect area of the four Time-Of-Arrival circles is obtained, andtherefore the smallest positioning error. After that, we consider the complete problem as a combinatorial optimization problem withthe corresponding object function that represents the nonlinear relationship between the intersection of the four circles and the mobilestation location. The Particle Swarm Optimization finds the optimal solution of the object function and efficiently determines themobile station location. The simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms conventional algorithms such as theWeighted Least Squares and the Levenberq-Marquardt method.


2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (S335) ◽  
pp. 58-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hebe Cremades

AbstractSophisticated instrumentation dedicated to studying and monitoring our Sun’s activity has proliferated in the past few decades, together with the increasing demand of specialized space weather forecasts that address the needs of commercial and government systems. As a result, theoretical and empirical models and techniques of increasing complexity have been developed, aimed at forecasting the occurrence of solar disturbances, their evolution, and time of arrival to Earth. Here we will review groundbreaking and recent methods to predict the propagation and evolution of coronal mass ejections and their driven shocks. The methods rely on a wealth of data sets provided by ground- and space-based observatories, involving remote-sensing observations of the corona and the heliosphere, as well as detections of radio waves.


1997 ◽  
Vol 34 (01) ◽  
pp. 134-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Calvert ◽  
Wiremu Solomon ◽  
Ilze Ziedins

We consider initially two parallel routes, each of two queues in tandem, with arriving customers choosing the route giving them the shortest expected time in the system, given the queue lengths at the customer's time of arrival. All interarrival and service times are exponential. We then augment this network to obtain a Wheatstone bridge, in which customers may cross from one route to the other between queues, again choosing the route giving the shortest expected time in the system, given the queue lengths ahead of them. We find that Braess's paradox can occur: namely in equilibrium the expected transit time in the augmented network, for some service rates, can be greater than in the initial network.


Author(s):  
Helong Wang ◽  
Wengang Mao ◽  
Leif Eriksson

Safety and energy efficiency are two of the key issues in the maritime transport community. A sail plan system, which combines the concepts of weather routing and voyage optimization, are recognized by the shipping industry as an efficient measure to ensure a ship’s safety, gain more economic benefit, and reduce negative effects on our environment. In such a system, the key component is to develop a proper optimization algorithm to generate potential ship routes between a ship’s departure and destination. In the weather routing market, four routing optimization algorithms are commonly used. They are the so-called modified Isochrone and Isopone methods, dynamic programming, threedimensional dynamic programming, and Dijkstra’s algorithm, respectively. Each optimization algorithm has its own advantages and disadvantages to estimate a ship routing with shortest sailing time or/and minimum fuel consumption. This paper will present a benchmark study that compare these algorithms for routing optimization aiming at minimum fuel consumption. A merchant ship sailing in the North Atlantic with full-scale performance measurements, are employed as the case study vessels for the comparison. The ship’s speed/power performance is based on the ISO2015 methods combined with the measurement data. It is expected to demonstrate the pros and cons of different algorithms for the ship’s sail planning.


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