An introduction to SEAROUTES

Advanced Decision Support for Shiprouting based on Full-scale Ship-specific Responses as well as Improved Sea and Weather Forecasts including Synoptic, High Precision and Realtime Satellite Data

The sea performance of a ship and, hence, the safety and well-being of its passengers and crew, the quality of life of people at sea, and the ship's cargo, its life time, speed, fuel consumption and emissions, the economics and environmental impact of sea transport, all depend on the sea state and weather along the ship's routes.

The captain of a ship needs to select ship specific optimum routes to minimize adverse and maximize beneficial effects, to be quantified in achievement functions.

Such an optimum route is achieved by the Searoutes system by combining the sea state responses of a ship from by its motion transfer functions, the so-called Response Amplitude Operators (RAO), mainly for roll, pitch and heave, and its propulsion-resistance relationship along with high precision and realtime data of the sea state and weather along the (approximate) route or cruising area of a ship. Actions from the sea surface winds and the reactions of the ship can be analyzed as well and added. Ship reactions to environmental loads shall be established and analyzed in numerical models to be used as operational nowcasting, forecasting and routing tools for specific ships and their transport specific loading plans. Those tools will considerably contribute to improve safety, economics, environmental impacts and logistics of ship transport.

Using such modern tested and tried technologies, Searoutes, which has been developed as a proper commercial product, gives the ships an Advanced Decision Support System to optimise their passages across the oceans.