Fuel usage data analysis for efficient shipping operations

There are incentives from maritime regulatory bodies to operate ships more efficiently, driven by the need to reduce CO2 budget. In order to establish more efficient ship operations, fuel consumption across the full operational profile of a vessel is needed. This could be accomplished through a complete characterisation through extensive sea-trials, or interpretation of data from monitoring systems. Results from repeated testing under controlled sea-trial conditions provides high-fidelity data, however, this approach is prohibitively expensive and requires repeating as the condition of the vessel changes with time. Conversely, data monitoring devices are relatively inexpensive, however, the process of analysing data can be complex, particularly when a ship's activities are diverse. This paper describes a methodology for associating ship activity with corresponding segments of a data-stream from a commercially available monitoring system. Further analysis is then performed to determine the fuel efficient performance of the ship. The case-study used is a harbour tug, although the approach used is applicable to other ship types, its success on this basis indicates the methodology is robust. To validate the methodology, results from the data analysis are compared to fuel consumption data measured under sea-trial conditions, and are found to be in close agreement.