NAVTRONIC · Navigational system for efficient maritime transport

There is a strong interest in the maritime community to optimize sailing time (expected time of arrival), reduce fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions and minimize maintenance cost. The objective of this project is to develop a sail planning system to help sea masters optimize these criteria. The proposed solution mimics the current human sail planning process. It will use ship specific data collection and real-time local and remote observations (3D-radar, Earth Observation data, etc.) combined with several state-of-the-art nowcast and forecast numerical models. It will monitor actual ship performance and assimilate this information in the sail plan optimization process. The access and systematic exploitation of this ground truth information will provide the unique capability of building "system experience", constantly improving the performance of different sub-models used in the sail plan optimizer. This will also reduce the sensitivity to ocean and weather forecast errors. The system will automatically and continuously compute and communicate optimized sail plans to a vessel. All relevant information justifying the results will be sent simultaneously (as for example a storm system, dangerous wave zones, security and other relevant information). The execution of the Navtronic system requires a central information centre that will be realized for exchanging ship relevant information and providing optimized real-time sail plans. The central information centre will be part of the GRID distributed processing reciprocity. The Navtronic project is highly end-user driven – the largest market players in the maritime community are partners and support the project with human resources, vessels and infrastructures for tests and evaluations.