The reduction of the environmental impact imposed by Kyoto Protocol and the growth of competitiveness imposed by the shipping market have urged shipping companies to pay increasing attention to ship energy efficiency improvement and CO2 emission reduction. According to the Ship Energy Efficiency Management Plan (SEEMP) recommended by the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the main scope of this article is in fact to overcome the deterministic limits of the monitoring systems installed in modern ships and support technical management in decision making based on large navigation databases. The proposed statistical approach is founded on a multiple linear regression and allows for both pointwise and interval predictions of the fuel consumption. At the end of each voyage, the model can be used to alert management for a possible change in ship performance in all those situations where the actual fuel consumption lies outside the prediction interval. Moreover, the model can also be utilized to quantify the contribution to the fuel consumption due to the hull and propeller fouling, which is particularly profitable for shipping companies and operators to claim for carbon credits after a specific improvement operation.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.