Research Of Ship Track Control And Weather Routing

Ship is designed for economical and reliable marine vehicle. Marine operationssuch as pipe-laying, drilling operations, cargo transportation, passenger transportation,marine airstrips, helicopter platforms and car-ferry operations may each requirespecialist vessels but within this variety is a small set of marine control problems. It isthe generic set of marine problems including course-keeping, roll-stabilization,path-following, vertical motion control, station-keeping and dynamic positioning thattaxes the ingenuity of the marine control engineer. Ingenuity and inspiration arerequired because the marine vessel set-up usually comprises only a few actuators–rudders, fins and, maybe, thrusters, to accomplish a primary objective likecourse-keeping–to travel from A to B–and possible secondary objectives likereduction in wave induced roll so that passengers have a pleasant ride–good levels ofpassenger comfort. An additional problem with the available actuators is that theyhave the non-linear characteristic of saturation.This paper provides an introduction to the field of ship motion control bystudying the algorithm for ship heading control and course-keeping control. A newmethod is proposed in this paper for the ship heading control. In this method, themethod of robust adaptive LQR steering control is combined with the method of leastsquares parameter identification and feedback linearization. The new method can notonly control the ship heading but also the ship steering rate. For course-keepingcontrol, a linear guidance algorithm and a curve guidance algorithm are proposed. Thetwo algorithm are both designed with the method of control Lyapunov function, so thestability of the guidance algorithm is assured. Also a method to compensate thedisturbance of current is provided in this paper.It is well known that Weather Routing is one of the effective ship operationmethods to reduce fuel consumption and many studies have been conducted todevelop the effective calculation methods. In this paper a minimum fuel routecalculation method for ships that use the precise forecasted environmental data and the propulsion performance data of the ship on actual seas is proposed. In theproposed method, improved ant colony algorithm is used to calculate an optimumminimum fuel route suitable for ships.Finally, simulation study was carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of theproposed method in this paper. As the result of study, the authors confirmed that theproposed calculation method is effective and applicable.