An Innovative Deep-Learning Technique for Fuel Demand Estimation in Maritime Transportation: A Step Toward Sustainable Development and Environmental Impact Mitigation

This study introduces an innovative deep-learning approach for fuel demand estimation in maritime transportation, leveraging a novel convolutional neural network, bidirectional, and long short-term memory attention as a deep learning model. The input variables studied include vessel characteristics, weather conditions, sea states, the number of ships entering the port, and navigation specifics. This study focused on the ports of Jazan in Saudi Arabia and Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates, analyzing daily and monthly data to capture fuel consumption patterns. The proposed model significantly improves prediction accuracy compared with traditional methods, effectively accounting for the complex, nonlinear interactions influencing fuel demand. The results showed that the proposed model has a mean square error of 0.0199 for the daily scale, which is a significantly higher accuracy than the other models. The model could play an important role in port management with a potential reduction in fuel consumption, enhancing port efficiency and minimizing environmental impacts, such as preserving seawater quality. This advancement supports sustainable development in maritime operations, offering a robust tool for operational cost reduction and regulatory compliance.