Minimal Time Route for Wind-Assisted Ships

As a result of a global call for energy-saving and emission-reduction strategies as well as an urgent need to reduce the shipping cost of transoceanic crossings, this paper proposes a route that minimizes the time for such crossings and provides technical support to efficiently utilize wind power based on existing research for wind-assisted ships. To begin, the ocean winds around the ship route were analyzed, and the different influences on traditional ships and wind-assisted ships were listed for various wind speeds and directions. The number of waypoints of a route was subsequently calculated, and a model of the optimal ship route was then built based on the fixed power output of the main marine engine. A solution algorithm based on simulated annealing was then presented to determine the optimal wind-assisted ship routes by minimizing the travel time. Finally, a 76,000-DWT wind-assisted cargo ship was designated as the experimental ship, and the optimization model and its algorithm were simulated to generate an optimized wind-assisted route. The simulation indicated that the speed of a ship equipped with wind propulsion increases, which significantly reduces the travel time and fuel costs over the optimized route, despite the increased distance of this route. Thus, the route optimization algorithm designed in this study can be applied to optimize the routes for wind-assisted ships and theoretically guide further studies of wind-assisted projects.