Multi-objective optimization in ship weather routing

Abstract

Ship weather routing problem has a crucial importance especially for transoceanic voyages, where voyage time reaches several days and the distance is thousands of nautical miles. This paper presents an optimization method for multi-objective ship weather routing problem. The voyage time and voyage risk are both taking into account and the multi-objective evolutionary algorithm NSGA-II (Non-Dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II) is applied to obtain the Pareto optimal routes set. At the same time the users can select route bi assigning a weight coefficient to meet their requirements in the obtained routes set. This paper focuses on the mathematical model of multi-objective ship weather routing problem and how to use NSGA-II to solve it. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the algorithm has been proved by carrying out the numerical simulation experiment.