Evolutionary Multi–Objective Weather Routing of Sailboats

Abstract

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, which may decrease with multiple turns or when experiencing an excessive heel angle for a long time. The optimisation process takes into account static bathymetry-related constraints as well as dynamic constraints related to the sailboat’s safety in changing wind and wave conditions. The method makes use of all of the above and finally returns an approximated Pareto set containing non-dominated solutions to the optimisation problem. The developed method has been implemented as a simulation application. The paper includes selected simulation results followed by their discussion.