An overview and comparison of different methods for ship weather routing

Weather routing optimisation in ship navigation has already become an attractive and important subject in the shipping industry driven by the increasing full oil price and considerations of environmental protection. Many studies have been published for development and application of various route optimisation methods. In this paper, the authors present an overview of different methods developed and used in the shipping market, including a newly developed forward dynamic programming methods for weather routing. A comparison study is focused on 2 most popularly used methods together with the newly developed forward dynamic programming method. Simulation results with data from a case ship have shown that the newly developed method is able to offer a better result in terms of fuel saving and practicability in ship outing optimisation.