Method for a simultaneous determination of the path and the speed for ship route planning problems

Recently, the need for a more efficient method for ship route planning was raised due to the financial crisis in the shipping industry, a strengthening of emission regulations, and the limitations of the existing methods. So far, numerous ship route planning methods have been developed, but most of them do not correctly reflect the effect of a change of the ship speed in the path-determination stage. For this study, a ship route planning problem was formulated as an optimization problem. To solve this, a method for a simultaneous determination of the path and the speed of a ship is proposed. To check the efficiency and the applicability of the proposed method, sensitivity analyses and a comparative test regarding some other methods was performed. The proposed method was applied to various examples of ship route planning and the results show that the proposed method can reduce the total fuel consumption compared with the other methods.