A Modelling System for Power Consumption of Marine Traffic

The International Maritime Organization (IMO) has enforced stricter limit on the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emission due to environment and climate concern. The measures to reduce GHG emissions from shipping can be divided into two groups. The first one is to improve ship energy efficiency through new technology, optimized operation and logistics, and the second one is to introduce alternative fuels with lower carbon intensity. However, the effectiveness and applicability of any measure depend on ship type, ship size, operation type, operation environment (wind and wave condition), as well as the cost of the measure. It is necessary to evaluate new measures in real shipping scenario. Modeling of ship fuel consumption and emission are fundamental input to evaluate the impacts of shipping on the environment and climate, and to evaluate new measures for reducing GHG emission. A modeling system is developed to estimate ship fuel consumption and emission, based on ship hydrodynamical models, information from Automatic Identification System (AIS), the IHS Fairplay database and metocean data. The modeling system aims to cover most of the ship types equipped with AIS transponders, and it will provide different hydrodynamical models to calculate fuel consumption based on the available ship information. In the paper, the modeling system will be described, and the power consumption from the modeling system are compared with the measurement data on one container ship. The comparison shows that the power consumption predicted with the modeling system agrees with measurement data well. The effects of weather data and measured speed on predicted power consumption are also analyzed.