Sustainability and energy efficiency issues, connected to the search for fuel consumption reductions and to the more and more mandatory international regulations regarding the emissions of atmospheric pollutants, are acquiring a growing relevance in shipping industry. In this context, the integration of forecasting resources for meteo-marine conditions with the capability of performing detailed ship performances simulations may give relevant contributions to improve the in service energy efficiency of ships through the use of weather routing systems. These systems are today widely used, almost in transoceanic navigation, and their effectiveness may be improved if they are utilized in integration with other energy efficiency measures and with observing systems for ship responses and encountered meteo-marine conditions. The work here reported has been developed in the context of the PROFUMO project, financed by the European Space Agency, in the framework of the IAP Artes 20 Programme for Feasibility Studies. Part of the project activities are devoted to perform numerical simulations of ship seakeeping and powering performances along Mediterranean routes, by the use of high resolution wind wave forecasts data produced by the operational service of Consorzio LaMMA. With this aim, in particular a numerical model of a real Ro-Ro ship has been constructed and the results of the numerical simulations are exploited to evaluate the potential impact of the variability of meteo-marine forecasting skills on weather routing and to estimate the potential contribution to fuel savings of meteorological route optimization at the Mediterranean scale.@en

In this work an integration of high-resolution meteo-marine forecast data with detailed ship powering and seakeeping computational algorithms is investigated in order to asses the potential for the attainable fuel savings by weather routing algorithms along relatively short routes (w.r.t. oceanic ones) as those in the Mediterranean Sea. The capability of high resolution models to predict the detailed space-time evolution of meteo-marine conditions at the Mediterranean basin scale is exploited in order to reliably forecast ship performances along Mediterranean routes. Based on this a computational framework applicable to weather routing algorithms is implemented and tested with the main goals of improving operational efficiency, by fuel savings, and of reducing the navigational risks connected to heavy weather at sea. The main elements of the proposed approach are: i) the construction of a detailed numerical model of a real ship; ii) the exploitation of in-service performance data recorded during real voyages of such a ship to tune its numerical model; iii) the use of high-resolution meteo-marine forecast and hindcast data for winds and complete directional wave spectra to assess the fuel saving potentialities of the implemented computational framework cited above. This last task is performed by exploiting forecast data coming from Ensemble Prediction Systems (EPS) applied to high resolution wind and wave forecasts. The obtained results are very interesting and encouraging to further develop the presented approaches. In particular a fuel saving potential ranging from few points of percentage till nearly 10% emerged from the two studied cases. Moreover the approach based on EPS reveled itself to be very useful as an investigation tool for the assessment of the reliability and stability of the fuel minimization with respect to forecast uncertainties.@en