Weather-Routing System Based on METOC Navigation Risk Assessment

Abstract

This paper presents a novel weather-routing system based on a multi-criteria setup. The set of 3 conflicting criteria is: travel time, ship navigation added resistance (caused by wind and waves), and navigation risk/safety. To this aim, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) safety guidelines are exploited for the design of navigation risk criterion as a function of the METeorological and OCeanographic (METOC) and sailing conditions. This risk is directly integrated into the multi-criteria setup, as an innovative alternative to the systems proposed in the open literature. The proposed methodology is tested in a real operational scenario in the Mediterranean Sea. The obtained results show how the proposed system provides alternative routes with minimum risk to the decision-makers, as well as other different alternative routes minimizing the other criteria.

Decision-making methodology in environmentally-conditioned ship operations based on ETD–ETA windows of opportunity

“…(2019), most of the operational weather forecast services do not provide the full spectra dependence (or ensemble forecasts) but only the long-term statistics of the state of the sea waves. For this reason, the considered implementation, described by Fabbri and Vicen-Bueno (2019), uses the average state of the sea waves for the selected AOI, but with increased resolution both in time and space, as the operational forecast service.…”

“…The domain of the available routes connecting the departure and arrival locations is defined in our implementation through a mathematical representation as a navigation graph (Fabbri and Vicen-Bueno, 2019). Inspired by the isochrones method (Lin et al., 2013), each route is defined through the navigation graph by a set of consecutive location nodes (or waypoints) connected through linking edges (or seaways); each edge has associated with it a cost (in a single-objective set-up) or a set of costs (in a multi-objective set-up) that defines the price(s) to be paid to traverse it.…”

“…The focus of this paper is therefore shifted from the formulation of the weather routing problem to the post processing of the data obtained from the solution of the optimisation problem. For this, a slightly different implementation (details provided in Section 2.3) of an existing weather routing system (developed by the authors in Fabbri et al., 2018; Fabbri and Vicen-Bueno, 2019) is used for the computation of the optimal routes between two endpoints. The computed Pareto set (representing different trade-offs between conflicting metrics) is used as the input for the execution of the proposed decision-making methodology.…”

“…The computed Pareto set (representing different trade-offs between conflicting metrics) is used as the input for the execution of the proposed decision-making methodology. In our previous works Fabbri et al., 2018; Fabbri and Vicen-Bueno, 2019, we introduced the navigation risk metric as a safety measure to be optimised in the weather routing multi-objective set-up together with two other objectives (travel time and added resistance). In this work, we extrapolate this objective from the optimisation stage for its exploitation at the decision stage.…”

Approach to Risk Performance Reasoning with Hidden Markov Model for Bauxite Shipping Process Safety by Handy Carriers

“…This study laid the foundation for risk reasoning of the bauxite shipping process. Fabbri [38] carried out navigation risk assessment using meteorological and oceanographic (METOC) methods, which provided a useful reference for the risk reasoning of Handy bauxite carriers, embodying the performance of cargo.…”