Ship voyage optimisation considering environmental forces using the iterative Dijkstra's algorithm

The original Dijkstra's algorithm requires the weight map for the network to find the optimum path; however, the change of weights due to temporal change in the met-ocean parameters makes it difficult to use this algorithm for ship navigation; hence, the path was discretised into a limited number of segments and an iterative scheme was developed in which the weight of network was determined based on the environmental condition at the time of ship navigation. A container trip from the Chabahar port in the Gulf of Oman to the Mumbai port in eastern India was studied. The objective was to minimize the fuel consumption. The results showed a decrease of ∼6 tons in the amount of fuel consumption and the total costs in the optimal path were 4.76% less than the path of the great circle arc. The proposed model is simple and effective to be run for operational route optimization.