Study of potential benefits of ship route planning considering fuel consumption, ETA and fatigue damage accumulation

This study is part of a larger project on ship performance, monitoring systems and route planning. The aim is to reduce the fuel consumption and the fatigue damage accumulation by smarter ship routing, and it should also consider the sailing time and time schedule for cargo transportation. In the current investigation, a fatigue routing model developed by the authors is presented. The potential of using the model for ship fatigue routing is demonstrated using a 2800TEU container vessel operating between North America and Europe as a case study vessel. This vessel was selected since the authors possess the information and data needed to carry out detailed analyses on different ship routes and seasons with respect to fatigue damage accumulation, fuel consumption and time at sea. Since the wave environment is the most essential characteristics affecting a ship’s operation conditions, performance and structural integrity, hindcast environment data was collected to describe the variation of wave environments along “measured” ship routes. Results are presented from a number of analyses focused on ship fatigue routing, followed by analyses of comparisons of simulations for different seasons and ship routes with regard to fatigue damage accumulation, fuel consumption and time at sea