Multi-Objective Weather Routing Algorithm for Ships: The Perspective of Shipping Company’s Navigation Strategy

Abstract

Ship weather routing has always been an important issue in the research field of navigation, and many scholars have been devoted to this research for a long time. To study the route strategies of different shipping companies, this paper proposes an improved multi-objective ant colony optimization (IMACO) algorithm based on the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). It can comprehensively consider ship navigation risk and fuel consumption cost under complex sea conditions. First, the grid method is used to model the marine environment. Then, we calculate the fuel consumption and the ship navigation risk of each grid and use the TOPSIS method to evaluate these two indicators for each grid. The results show that due to the different strictness of navigation management requirements of different companies, different routes are selected in the same sea area at the same time. Compared with the single-objective ant colony optimization (SACO) algorithm, the algorithm proposed in this paper can more comprehensively and effectively solve the problem of route strategy selection of shipping companies, which has great practical significance for ship operations management.