Vessels sailing in a single platoon could reduce resistance from the perspective of the whole platoon and the individual vessel, and contribute to improving energy benefits. Moreover, transportation energy costs and traffic efficiency are essential indicators for measuring waterborne transportation systems. We attempt to minimize transportation energy costs by coordinating platoon formation using a distributed framework of controllers. A large-scale coordinated vessel platooning program is proposed to minimize transportation energy costs and optimize traffic efficiency while guaranteeing safety. The control framework covers routing, energy consumption-dependent cooperative platooning decision and speed optimization based on graph search algorithm, cluster analysis, optimal control approach and model predictive control. Firstly, a local scheduling strategy combined with the leader vessel selection algorithm is adopted. Furthermore, we used cluster analysis to create a series of mergeable vessel platooning sets. Then, we used the mathematical planning method and a two-step hybrid optimal control approach to calculate the improvement and optimization of each vessel platoon's path and speed. Finally, the scalability of the scheduling strategy is elucidated. In a simulation of large scale inland waterborne network, savings surpassed 3.5% when six hundreds vessels participated in the system. These simulation results reveal that the scheduling strategy coordinating vessels into vessel platooning, which improves transportation efficiency as well as descends cost, comparing to a fixed origin route in the waterway network.

Wave-to-Wire models play an important role in the development of wave energy converters. They could provide insight into the complete operating process of wave energy converters, from the power absorption stage to the power conversion stage. In order to cover a set of relevant nonlinear effects, wave-to-wire models are predominately established in the time domain. However, the low computational efficiency of time-domain modeling is hindering the extensive application of wave-to-wire models, especially in early-stage design and optimization where a large number of iterations are required. To address this issue, a spectral-domain wave-to-wire model is proposed, and the nonlinear effects are incorporated by stochastic linearization. This model can significantly reduce the computational load and maintain good accuracy. The reference concept studied in this paper is defined as a heaving point absorber coupled with a linear permanent-magnet generator. Four representative nonlinear effects involved in both the hydrodynamic stage and the electrical stage of the concept are considered. The proposed model is verified against a corresponding nonlinear time-domain wave-to-wire model, and a good agreement is observed. The relative error of the proposed spectral-domain wave-to-wire model is around 2 % in typical operational regions and is still within 7 % for wave states with large significant wave heights, regarding the estimate of the power conversion efficiency. Meanwhile, the computational load of the spectral-domain wave-to-wire model is reduced by 2 to 3 orders of magnitudes compared with the conventional time-domain approach. Finally, a case study of tuning the PTO damping to maximize power production is conducted to demonstrate the performance of the proposed spectral-domain wave-to-wire model.

With the continual development of modern transportation technology and artificial intelligence technology, how to recognize the complex phenomenon of ship behavior existing in maritime traffic has become a hot topic. Maritime traffic is a complex system, the emergence of ship behavior is a leading cause of traffic complexity, and make up the core ideas of this research. This research studies ship behavior from three aspects: ship individual behavior, ship-ship interaction and multi-ship behavior. According to the movement state attribute, the improved Social Force Model has been developed by considering of the interactive effects between ships. On that foundation, the complex network model has been built to analyze the emergence of multi-ship behavior in a macroscopic view. Through experimental analysis of ship behavior in different scenarios, the results show that the repulsive force between ships changes in the ship behavior dynamic model can express the dynamic characteristics of the ship. And structural entropy in marine traffic situation complex network has been proved to describe the maritime traffic system. As such, the framework proposed in this paper can provide a new perspective for further understanding and research of ship behavior.