Ship Fuel and Carbon Emission Estimation Utilizing Artificial Neural Network and Data Fusion Techniques

Ship energy consumption and emission prediction are the main concern of the shipping industry for ship energy efficiency management and pollution gas emission control. And they are attracting more global attention and research interests because of the increase in global shipping trade volume. As the core of maritime transportation, a large volume of data is collected around ships such as voyage data. Due to the rapid development of computational power and the widely equipped AIS device on ships, the use of maritime big data for improving and monitoring ship’s energy efficiency is becoming possible. In this paper, a fuel consumption and carbon emission model using the artificial neural network (ANN) framework is proposed by using AIS, ship machinery, and weather data. The proposed work is a complete framework including data collection, data cleaning, data clustering and model-building methodology. To obtain the suitable parameters of the model, the number of neurons, data inputs and activate functions were tested on both AIS-based data and MRV-based data for comparison. The results show that the proposed method can provide a solid prediction of ship’s fuel consumption and carbon emissions under varying weather conditions.