New Developments of PMS-Integrated Weather Routing for Wind-Assisted Ship Equipped with Energy Storage System and Hydro-Generation Ability

Abstract A wind-assisted ship can be fitted with a hydro-generation ability to generate electricity when the Wind propulsion systems (WPS) provide more power than required for propulsion and an Energy Storage System (ESS) to store this energy or optimize engine load. Conventional weather routing approaches focus on minimizing energy consumption but ignore interactions between route, Power Management Strategy (PMS) and ESS capabilities. This study introduces an innovative PMS-integrated weather routing method using a four-dimensional multi-state graph to optimize fuel consumption. Simulations are conducted for a diesel-electric wind-assisted ship across multiple trips for each of the 5 selected routes and both directions using 2023 weather data, comparing the new method with conventional routing and PMS. Key findings reveal that ESS integration enables trips otherwise infeasible due to genset power limitation. For the tested routes and vessel, the trip success rate increased from 68% without ESS to 84% with a 90 MWh battery combined with the PMS-integrated weather routing algorithm imposing SOC at departure = SOC at arrival. Imposing SOC at departure = 100% and SOC at arrival = 0%, trip success rate reached 94%. Fuel savings were also significant: use of a 30 MWh battery (with identical SOC at departure/arrival) reduced average fuel consumption by 0.75 kg nm-1 (1.4%) with PMS-integrated weather routing and by 0.70 kg nm-1 (1.3%) with conventional routing. This research emphasizes the potential of ESS in wind-assisted ships combined with the proposed PMS-integrated weather routing algorithm to enhance operational feasibility and fuel efficiency. Keywords weather routing; power management strategy; energy storage system; wind-assisted ship; hydro-generation; hybrid ship