Container Ship Carbon and Fuel Estimation in Voyages Utilizing Meteorological Data with Data Fusion and Machine Learning Techniques

The International Maritime Organization (IMO) had made effort to reduce the ship’s energy consumption and carbon emission by optimizing the ship’s operational measures such as speed and weather routing. However, existing fuel consumption models were relatively simple without considering the quantified effect of weather conditions. In this paper, a knowledge-based ridge regression-based algorithm is presented for enabling automated fuel consumption estimation under varying weather conditions during voyages. Wind speed, wave height, ship speed, draught, AIS segment distance, and ship’s heading (HDG) are used as input to predict the fuel consumption value from the MRV report. In this work, 3 types of models are tested: AIS-based model, MRV-based model, and MRV-based normalized model. In AIS based model, weather conditions are divided into nine categories based on wind speed, wave height, and wind directions then trained separately. In MRV-based mode, the daily weather condition was used, and the MRV-normalized model used the normalized daily weather data. The proposed ridge regression models (11 models total) were tested with 4 container ships for a period of one year, and the result shows that compared to real fuel consumption, MRV-based model could achieve the best result with an average error less than 3% comparing to real MRV report.