The aim of the paper is to outline a project focusing on the development of a new type of ship weather routing solution with improved uncertainty handling, through better estimation of ship performance and responses to sea conditions. Ensemble forecasting is considered to take into account the uncertainty levels that are typical of operations in a stochastic environment. Increased accuracy of weather prediction is achieved through...

The Multicriteria Evolutionary Weather Routing Algorithm (MEWRA) has already been introduced by the author on earlier TransNav 2009 and 2011 conferences with a focus on theoretical application to a hybrid-propulsion or motor-driven ship. This paper addresses the topic of possible practical weather routing applications of MEWRA. In the paper some practical advantages of utilizing Pareto front as a result of multicriteria optimization...

The paper presents a multi-objective deterministic method of weather routing for sailing vessels. Depending on a particular purpose of sailboat weather routing, the presented method makes it possible to customize the criteria and constraints so as to fit a particular user’s needs. Apart from a typical shortest time criterion, safety and comfort can also be taken into account. Additionally, the method supports dynamic weather data:...

Selected COLREG rules, good seamanship and sheer common sense indicate that it is in a sailboat's interest to follow collision-free routes without relying on large power-driven ships to give way. Until now, however, no method has integrated a sailboat's weather routing with collision risk monitoring and collision avoidance. Therefore, a new deterministic approach to combine the above features within one method is introduced here....

The paper presents a multi-objective method, which optimises the route of a sailboat. The presented method makes use of an evolutionary multi-objective (EMO) algorithm, which performs the optimisation according to three objective functions: total passage time, a sum of all course alterations made during the voyage and the average angle of heel. The last two of the objective functions reflect the navigator’s and passenger’s comfort,...