Applied Ocean Research 82 (2019) 1–9

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Applied Ocean Research

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/apor

Probabilistic modeling of ship powering performance using full-scale T

operational data
Byunghyun Yoo, Jinwhan Kim
⁎

Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, Republic of Korea

ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT

Keywords: The energy efficiency of ocean-going vessels can be increased through various operational considerations, such
Ship powering performance as improved cargo arrangements and weather routing. The first step toward the goal of maximizing the energy
Gaussian processes efficiency is to analyze how the ship's powering performance changes under different operational settings and
Domain knowledge weather conditions. However, existing analytical models and empirical methods have limitations in reliably
Environmental uncertainty
estimating the powering performance of full-scale ships in real operating conditions. In this study, machine
learning techniques are employed to estimate the powering performance of a full-scale ship by constructing
regression models using the ship's operational data. In order to minimize the risk of overfitting in the regression
process, domain knowledge based on physical principles is combined into the regression models. Also, the
uncertainty of the estimated performance is evaluated with consideration of the environmental uncertainties.
The obtained regression models can be used to predict the ship speed and engine power under different op-
erational settings and weather conditions.

1. Introduction
International regulations on the energy efficiency of ocean-going
vessels have been reinforced in response to increased concerns about
environmental pollution and global warming. This drives the research
to analyze the powering performance of full-scale ships under varying
environmental and operating conditions [1,2]. There are various factors
that affect the powering performance and the resulting fuel efficiency of
ships, such as operational settings, weather conditions and human
factors. Fig. 1 illustrates how the ship speed and engine power are in-
fluenced by these operational settings and environmental conditions.
Various analytical methods and empirical formulas have been sug-
gested in the past [3], however they do not provide satisfactory results
in modeling the ship's powering performance in real-sea operating
conditions with sufficient accuracy, mainly because of the lack of op-
erational data, measurement uncertainties and the complex relation-
ships between the ship performance and various influencing factors [4].
As computational resources have become more powerful and effi-
cient, data-driven statistical methods for analyzing the powering per-
formance of full-scale ships using measurement data obtained in real
operating conditions have attracted increased attention. A gray-box
model was used to determine the optimal operating conditions and
predict the fuel consumption of a ship [5–7], and the fuel consumption
and associated emissions of a ship were assessed using the ship's op-
erational data [8–10]. Also, the fuel consumption and speed curve of a
ship were estimated using noon reports [11], a decision support system
for predicting the fuel consumption was suggested [12], and the ship's
energy efficiency was estimated using Monte-Carlo methods [13].
More recently, machine learning (ML) techniques have been
adopted and utilized to estimate the powering performance of ships.
Artificial neural network (ANN) and Gaussian process (GP) techniques
were employed to calculate the ship's fuel efficiency [14–16] and an
ensemble neural network was used to predict the shaft power of a
towboat [17]. The k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) algorithms was applied to
trim optimization [18], and the support vector machine (SVM) was
used to identify parameters of a ship [19–21].
However, the performance models that are purely based on the above-
mentioned machine learning algorithms are often susceptible to statistical
overfitting [22]. There are many influencing factors associated with ship
performance modeling, and increasing the number of parameters in the
model generally reduces the regression error. In order to minimize the
risk of overfitting, this study suggests incorporating the domain knowl-
edge of ship propulsion into the design of regression models based on
statistical analysis and machine learning. As a machine learning method,
GP is proposed to be used, which is known to be effective and powerful in
describing complicated nonlinear models [23–25].

⁎
Corresponding author at: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), 291 Daehak-ro, Yuseong-gu,
Daejeon 34141, Republic of Korea.
E-mail address: jinwhan@kaist.ac.kr (J. Kim).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apor.2018.10.013
Received 1 January 2018; Received in revised form 8 October 2018; Accepted 19 October 2018
Available online 02 November 2018
0141-1187/ © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
B. Yoo, J. Kim Applied Ocean Research 82 (2019) 1–9

Table 2
List of measurement data.
Ship operational data Weather forecast data

Trim Wind speed

Draft Wind direction
Engine power Wave height
Engine RPM Wave period
Ship speed Wave direction
Ship heading Current speed
Rudder angle Current direction

Fig. 1. The energy efficiency of a full-scale ship can be affected by various

influencing factors which include the ship's operational settings and environ-
mental conditions such as wind and waves.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 introduces

the data and the graphical model used to describe the ship performance.
Section 3 addresses the modeling procedure of estimating the ship
performance in terms of ship speed and engine power. Section 4 con-
tains the results and discussion of the analysis. Finally, the conclusions
are presented in Section 5.

2. Powering performance modeling

2.1. Data for performance analysis Fig. 2. Scatter plot of engine power vs. ship speed.

The actual operational data of a full-scale containership in real-sea

operating conditions were collected. The weather data were provided
by Weathernews Inc. (WNI), and the resolution of the weather data is
1.0 degree in the longitude and latitude directions. Ship operational
and weather data are used for powering performance analysis in this
study.
Ship motion and engine states were measured over time using a
number of sensors installed in the ship. Table 1 shows the ship's prin-
cipal dimensions and the specifications of the propulsion system.
Fig. 3. Engine RPM measurements.
Table 2 describes the list of the obtained operational and weather data
used for the analysis.
Fig. 2 shows the scatter plots between the engine power and ship steady-state where the rudder and RPM commands are maintained
speed. within a threshold range are extracted. The extracted values are aver-
As expected, the engine power increases with the ship speed, aged over 5 minute intervals, and the averaged values are defined as
however the data are scattered considerably due to the influence of feature points. In Fig. 3, feature ID denotes the index number for each of
other factors and uncertainties such as environmental disturbances. the extracted feature points which are numbered in time.
The time history of engine RPM measurements are shown in Fig. 3.
The figure shows that the ship's RPM is maintained constant at 2.2. Structure of models
different values over different time intervals. This study focuses on
analyzing and modeling the powering performance of the ship in This study suggests the use of graphical models to identify key in-
steady-state operational conditions. For this, the operational data at fluencing factors and to find an appropriate model structure for the
ship's powering performance. The goal of the modeling is to determine
Table 1 the conditional probability distribution p(PB, V|nB, O, W), which re-
Specifications of the ship (4600 TEU class containership) and propulsion presents the probability of the target variables (ship speed and engine
system. power) given the input variables (engine RPS, operating conditions, and
Ship specification weather conditions), where PB is the engine power, V is the ship speed,
Length overall 254.7 m nB is the engine RPS, O represents the operating conditions such as trim
Beam (breadth) 37.5 m and draft, and W denotes the weather conditions. If the ship speed and
Depth 19.5 m
the engine power are assumed to be conditionally independent given
Design draft 12.0 m
the input variables, p(PB, V|nB, O, W) can be expressed as:
Propeller and engine information
Propeller diameter 8.1 m p (PB , V |nB , O , W )
Propeller blade number 5
Pitch diameter ratio 0.932
=p (PB |nB , O, W ) p (V |nB , O, W ) (1)
Expended area ratio 0.7
whose graphical model is illustrated in Fig. 4.
Main engine model 8RT-flex-68D
Maximum continuous rating (MCR) of engine 25040 kW × 95 rpm This conditional independence assumption leads to a rather simple
probability model [15]. However, the assumption is not exactly true,

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B. Yoo, J. Kim Applied Ocean Research 82 (2019) 1–9

Fig. 4. Graphical model with the conditional independence between the ship
Fig. 5. Graphical model representing the dynamics of ship propulsion: The
speed and engine power given the input variables, expressed by Eq. (1).
relevant equation numbers are shown next to corresponding nodes.

since the ship speed and engine power are in fact dependent. Using these equations, a full graphical model is established as
In this study, a new probability model that considers a more realistic shown in Fig 5 , which can be considered as a dynamic Bayesian net-
relationship between the influencing factors is proposed. For this, gra- work (DBN) [30].
phical models are constructed based on the physical principles asso- Fig. 5 represents the time-dependent ship performance, and the
ciated with ship propulsion, and the relationship between the related superscripts t − 1, t, and t + 1 indicate the previous, current, and next
physical variables are analyzed qualitatively. time step, respectively. At time t, the thrust Tt and the total resistance of
Under quasi-static conditions, the dynamics of ship propulsion [26] the ship Rt determine the acceleration of the ship at and consequently
can be described using the equations in the following: the speed Vt. QBt and Qpt , which are determined by nt, are also influenced
by PBt and Vt, respectively. The engine and propeller torques affect the
Engine RPS: nB = np (2)
engine RPS at the next time step nt+1, and this process is repeated in
Engine power: PB = 2 nB QB (3) time.
The graphical model in Fig. 5 can be simplified as the model illu-
Propeller thrust: T = KT np2 d4 (4) strated in Fig. 6 which is represented in terms of the key variables
specified in Eq. (1). Considering that the main interest of this study is to
Propeller torque: Qp = KQ np2 d5 (5) model the ship's powering performance in steady-state, Fig. 6 can be
further simplified into the model shown in Fig. 7. In the steady-state
Engine dynamics: 2 Ip np = s QB Qp (6) operating condition, the value of the state variables (i.e., node values)
do not change in time, and thus the edges connecting the current states
Ship dynamics: T = R (7)
and the same states at the previous time step are removed.
Ship resistance: R = fr (V , O, W ). (8) From the d-separation property [31], the engine power is con-
ditionally independent of the operating and weather conditions, given
the engine RPS and ship speed. According to the steady-state graphical
model shown in Fig. 7, the target probability model can be represented
as follows:
nB Engine RPS (RPM/60) np Propeller RPS (RPM/60)
QB Engine torque Qp Propeller torque
KQ Torque coefficient KT Thrust coefficient
p (PBt, V t|nBt , nBt+ 1, Ot , W t ) p (PB, V |nB , O, W )
T Thrust R Ship resistance = p (PB |V , n, O , W ) p (V |n, O, W )
d Propeller diameter ρ Density of water = p (PB |V , n) p (V |n, O , W ). (9)
Ip Total inertia of propeller
ηs Mechanical efficiency from engine to propeller
λ Gear ratio between propeller shaft and engine
Note that the superscripts indicating time step have been dropped out,
since the target probability model is expressed in the steady-state
condition.
The engine power can be calculated using the propeller RPS and In the obtained steady-state graphical model, the engine power is
torque. The propeller thrust and torque are characterized by the thrust modeled as p(PB|V, n) with the ship speed and engine RPS as input
and torque coefficients, KT and KQ, as shown in Eqs. (3) and (4). In
general, these two coefficients are experimentally determined by the
model test, and modeled as the polynomial function of the ship's ad-
vance ratio [27].
In Eq. (8), the ship resistance is expressed as a nonlinear function fr
which depends mainly on the ship speed and also affected by the op-
erational settings and weather conditions. Various studies have been
conducted to establish a ship resistance model considering the non-
linear hydrodynamic effects [28], however it is still difficult to reliably
estimate the resistance in different operational settings and weather
conditions, especially due to complex ship motions in waves.
For ships with diesel engines, the main engine is generally directly
connected to the propeller shaft [29]. Therefore, the engine RPS nB is
regarded to be the same as the propeller RPS np, both represented by n, Fig. 6. Graphical model for the simplified dynamics of ship propulsion in terms
hereafter. of PB, V, n, O and W.

3
B. Yoo, J. Kim
Fig. 7. Graphical model for the ship propulsion in steady-state operating con-
ditions.
variables. This probability model involves less input variables com-
pared to the model in Eq. (1). In particular, the weather and operating
conditions are not directly involved in this probability model, which
reduces the required number of regression parameters and decreases
the risk of overfitting.
The probability model for ship speed, p(V|n, O, W), involves more
candidate input variables, including the engine RPS, operating and
weather conditions. It is desirable to reduce the number of independent
variables to minimize the risk of overfitting. Among various weather-
induced environmental disturbances, wave and wind are dominant in-
fluencing factors that affect the ship resistance and speed. In this study,
for a convenient and accurate evaluation of weather-induced dis-
turbance effects on the ship's propulsion performance, the wind speed
and wave height are represented separately in their longitudinal (head-
wind and head-wave) and lateral (cross-wind and cross-wave) compo-
nents relative to the ship's heading direction. Using these coordinate-
transformed environmental disturbances, the principal component
analysis (PCA) is applied to investigate the influence of these environ-
mental disturbances on the powering performance, the resulting plot is
shown in Fig. 8.
Fig. 8 shows that the vectors associated with the variables of interest
are projected onto the first two principal axes. If the arrows of different
variables are collinear, it indicates that the corresponding variables are
highly correlated. The result shows that the head-wave and head-wind
components in the ship's longitudinal direction have a high correlation
with the ship speed. The effects of cross-wave and cross-wind on the
Fig. 8. Principal component analysis of the environmental disturbance factors
on other performance variable.
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Applied Ocean Research 82 (2019) 1–9
ship speed are not as direct as the effect of wind and wave in the
longitudinal direction. However, it is worthwhile to note that the cross-
wind and cross-wave components show high correlation with the
rudder angle. This is conjectured to be due to the fact that the en-
vironmental disturbances in the ship's lateral direction induce the use of
the ship's rudder to counteract the sideway forces. In order to more
closely examine the relationship between each individual environ-
mental disturbance and the rudder angle, two scatter plots are shown in
Fig. 9.
The figure shows that the rudder angle is highly correlated with the
cross-wave and cross-wind disturbances, which agrees with the result of
PCA and the following conjecture. Considering this finding, instead of
the cross-wave and cross-wind, the rudder angle is introduced into the
model as an additional independent variable. Therefore, the engine
RPS, trim, draft, head-wave, head-wind, and rudder angle are selected
as the independent variables to estimate the probability model for the
ship speed.
Using the rudder angle as an independent variable can be ad-
vantageous in modeling the ship's powering performance. However, it
may not be straightforward to predict the powering performance given
the weather forecast information only. To estimate the expected rudder
usage under the environmental disturbances in the lateral direction for
applying the proposed approach to the performance prediction, the
rudder angle is modeled as a linear function of the cross-wave and
cross-wind conditions based on the ship operational data. This function
can be utilized when the ship powering performance needs to be pre-
dicted solely using weather forecast data.
3. Regression models
In this study, the probability model of the ship's powering perfor-
mance is expressed as the multiplication of two probability functions:
the probability function for the ship's speed and the probability function
for the engine power. The probability function for the speed p(V|n, O,
W) involves the environmental disturbance components which are
difficult to be modeled using conventional parametric approaches.
Considering this difficulty, the GP model is proposed to be used to
build the regression model for the ship speed. GP is a powerful tool for
statistical regression in a continuous space [32]. It assumes that the
model function f(x) follows a Gaussian process and can be modeled
using input and output data. The conditional distribution of the test
outputs f* given the measurements is important for GP regression,
which is described as
2
f*|X* , X , f N (µf (X*), f (X *)) (10)
where
µf (X*) = K (X* , X ) K (X , X ) 1f
2
f (X *) = K (X * , X * ) K (X* , X ) K (X , X ) 1K (X , X*).
Here, K(X, X*) denotes the n × n* matrix of the covariances evaluated at
all pairs of training points X and testing points X*. In this study, the
squared exponential function is selected as a covariance function,
which is expressed as
2 d (xi xi )2
k (x , x ) = f0 exp i=1 2 2
fi (11)
where i = 0, …, d are the hyper-parameters of the regression model.
2
fi ,
More details regarding the GP algorithm can be found in [32].
3.1. Regression modeling
3.1.1. Ship speed
The regression model for the ship's speed is trained using GP.
However, a straightforward implementation of GP regression may cause
B. Yoo, J. Kim Applied Ocean Research 82 (2019) 1–9

Fig. 9. Scatter plots show the correlation between the rudder angle and the environmental disturbances in the lateral direction.

an overfitting problem. To minimize the risk of overfitting, this study

suggests incorporating the domain knowledge of ship propulsion into
the regression model. For example, according to the physics of ship
propulsion, the ship speed is approximately proportional to the engine
RPS, and it is reasonable to exploit the property to establish the ship
speed model. If this relationship is seriously violated, the model is
unlikely to be valid and reliable.
In order to integrate such domain knowledge into the model, the
regularization scheme is employed in this study. Regularization is a
common technique that introduces additional information to solve ill-
posed problems or to prevent overfitting [31]. The cost function J for
the GP regression with the regularization scheme is represented as the
sum of the GP regression error and the cost due to regularization, which
is expressed as:
J=L+ S (12)
where L is the log marginal likelihood and S is the regularization cost. α
Fig. 10. Steady-state operating data points at constant RPM conditions plotted
is the weighting factor that controls the importance of the regularizer S in the speed-power plane.
which is defined as:
2V 2
nf
S= dn.
0 n2 (13)
The figure shows that the engine power decreases almost linearly
The regularizer is applied over the RPS interval from 0 to nf where nf is with the ship speed at the constant engine RPM conditions. This agrees
the maximum operating RPS. The linear relationship between the en- with our domain knowledge on the relationship between the torque
gine RPS and the ship speed is strengthened by the regularizer. coefficient and the advance ratio. Therefore, using the given full-scale
The hyper-parameters of the GP model are optimized considering ship operational data, the propeller torque is modeled as a linear
the cost function using the conjugate gradient method [33]. The con- function of advance ratio J, and the associated parameters C1 and C2 are
jugate gradient method is an algorithm to calculate the numerical so- estimated using the following equations.
lution of sparse systems of linear equations whose matrix is symmetric 2
and positive-definite. It is known to have low computational cost with PB = ( 1J + 2) d5n3
s
high convergence rate to the exact solution and thus has been widely
used to solve sparse systems that are too large to be handled. (
= C1 n + C2
V
) d5n3
(15)

where
3.1.2. Engine power
The equation of dynamics for the engine power can be expressed as: 2 1 (1 wf ) 2 2
C1 = , C2 =
2 sd s
PB = 2 QB n = (KQ d5n2 ) n.
s (14)
Here, the torque coefficient KQ is modeled as a function of the advance 3.2. Uncertainty modeling
ratio J = V (1 wf )/(nd) where wf is the wake fraction factor. In gen-
eral, model tests are conducted to find KQ and wf , and thus these Among the selected independent variables for modeling the ship
parameters are not directly available in full-scale ship operational data. powering performance, weather data have relatively large uncertainty,
In order to determine the torque coefficient only using the ship op- and thus their uncertainty effects are incorporated into the regression
erational data, the scatter plot in Fig. 2 is examined and analyzed more models. The weather data are provided by weather forecast services and
closely, as shown in Fig. 10. they are given with no uncertainty information. Therefore, in this

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B. Yoo, J. Kim Applied Ocean Research 82 (2019) 1–9

Fig. 11. Comparison between the actual mea-

surement data and the valued estimated by the
regression model on test dataset for the ship
speed.

study, environmental uncertainties are modeled using the general sta- random variables, and their means and variances are determined by
tistical distributions around the given weather conditions. In the ex- linear regression [39–42] using the ship's operational data.
isting literature, Rayleigh distributions are commonly used to model the
statistical distributions of wind speed and wave height [34–36]. Here, 4. Results and discussion
the variance parameters of the Rayleigh distributions for wave height
and wind speed are estimated using the significant wave height and the The given full-scale operational data were split into training and test
average wind speed given in the weather data. Then, the estimated datasets. The ratio between the training and test datasets was set to 2:1
weather uncertainty distributions are approximated as Gaussian dis- and the test dataset was not used during the training step for estimating
tributions for using them as input uncertainties into the GP regression the regression model.
model. The performance of regression for the ship speed and the engine
power is evaluated by the root-mean-square error (RMSE) and the
3.2.1. Ship speed normalized root-mean-square error (NRMSE)
By approximating the uncertainty inputs as Gaussian distribution
yi )2
[37,38], the GP-based probability model for the ship speed is estimated.
N
i = 1 (yˆi
RMSE =
Given a set of N data pairs = {y i , x i }iN= 1, f(x) indicates the GP function N
RMSE
for the ship speed. The distribution of the function of random variable NRMSE = y¯ (20)
x * N (µ x , x ) is obtained by
where y is the measured data of the output variable, ŷ is the estimated
*
*

p (f (x *)|µ x , x*, )= p (f (x *)|x *, ) p (x *)dx*. (16) output, N is the number of the data points, and ȳ is the mean value of
*
the measured data y, which is a normalizing factor.
The integral in Eq. (16) is analytically intractable due to the complexity
of p(f(x*)|x*), and thus it is approximated as a Gaussian distribution.
The mean and variance of this approximated function are expressed as: 4.1. Regression model for ship performance

µ fnew (x *) = E x * [Ef (x ) [f (x *)|x *]] = E x * [µf (x *)]

* 4.1.1. Ship speed
2
(x *) = E x * [Varf (x ) (f (x *)|x *)] The actual ship speed measurement data and the estimated values
fnew
by the proposed model are shown in Fig. 11. The figure shows that the
*
+ Varx* (Ef (x ) [f (x *)|x *])
* proposed model estimates the ship speed fairly accurately.
2
= Ex* [ f (x *)] + Varx * (µf (x *)). (17) To examine the effectiveness of the proposed regularization scheme,
the errors of the GP models before and after applying the regularization
Using a first-order Taylor expansion around µ x , the mean and covar-
* are compared. In addition, the following polynomial model with the
iance can be approximated as:
same set of independent variables used for the proposed GP model is
µ fnew (x *) = µf (µ x ) evaluated and compared.
*

2 2 1
2 2 (x )
f * Vˆ = a1 n2 + a2 Hhw
2 2
+ a3 Vhw + a4 t + a5 D + a6 2
(21)
fnew (x *) = f (µ x ) + 2 Trace x*
* x xT
* * x*=µ x
* where ai, i = 1, …, 6 are the coefficients of the polynomial model, Hhw
µf (x *) T µ f (x * ) is the head-wave height, Vhw is the head-wind speed, t is the trim, D is
+ x* =µ x x* .
x* * x*
x *=µ x (18) the draft, and δ is the rudder angle. Table 3 shows the quantitative
*
comparison between these three regression models.
In the standard GP framework, the input variables are assumed to For the training dataset, the GP model without regularization per-
have no uncertainty, and the uncertainty in the output function is only forms better than the GP with regularization. However, applying the
considered. However, this study suggests considering the environ- regularization scheme provides more accurate results on the test da-
mental uncertainties in the input uncertainty x , and the effect of the taset. This confirms that both GP models outperform the polynomial
*
uncertain inputs on the output function is represented as an increased
uncertainty of the output function fnew .
2

Table 3
3.2.2. Engine power Error comparison for the ship speed model.
Eq. (15) can be rewritten as Model RMSE (kn) NRMSE (%)
PB V
= C1 n + C2 Training Test Training Test
d5n3 (19)
GP w/o regularization 0.17 0.49 1.14 3.35
where
GP w/ regularization 0.23 0.33 1.56 2.23
C1 N (µC1 , 2 2 Polynomial 0.59 0.63 4.00 4.31
C1 ), C2 N (µC2 , C2 ).

The model coefficients C1 and C2 are considered as Gaussian

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B. Yoo, J. Kim Applied Ocean Research 82 (2019) 1–9

Fig. 12. Comparison between the actual measurement data and the valued estimated by the regression model on test dataset for the engine power.

Table 4
Error comparison for the engine power model
Model RMSE (kW) NRMSE (%)

Training Test Training Test

Proposed 381 386 2.22 2.26

Base polynomial 563 574 3.29 3.36

model and the regularization technique helps to avoid overfitting, Fig. 14. Estimated uncertainty of ship speed before and after considering the
which leads to the improved regression performance. environmental uncertainty.

4.1.2. Engine power

The actual engine power measurement data and the estimated va-
lues by the proposed model are compared in Fig. 12.
The figure also shows that the engine power estimated by the pro-
posed model agrees well with the actual measurements. In order to
verify the accuracy of the proposed model, the conventional polynomial
model considering the cubic power dependence on the ship speed is
introduced as a baseline regression model, which is expressed by:
PˆB = b1 n3 + (b2 Hhw
2 2
+ b3 Vhw + b4 t + b5 D + b6 2) n
where bi, i = 1, …, 6 are the polynomial coefficients. The results by the
proposed regression model and the baseline polynomial model are
compared in Table 4 which summarizes the error performance of the
model on the training and test datasets.
Although the proposed regression model is a lower-dimensional
model which requires a much smaller number of parameters than the
baseline cubic-power polynomial model, the proposed model clearly
outperforms the baseline model in both the training and the test data-
sets. This confirms the validity of the proposed method.
In addition, in order to demonstrate the utility of the proposed
method in predicting the powering performance under arbitrary
weather conditions, the speed-power curves estimated by the proposed
method under several different wind and wave conditions in the
Beaufort scale [43] are shown in Fig. 13.
Compared with the scatter plot in Fig. 2, all the noise and un-
certainty in the measurement data are removed in Fig. 13 which clearly
shows the how the speed-power curves changes with weather condi-
(22) tions. The predicted curves agree with the physical intuition that the
engine power requirements increase in bad weather conditions.
4.2. Uncertainty modeling
4.2.1. Ship speed
The level of uncertainties in the regression model is also estimated
in this study. Fig. 14 shows the uncertainty of the ship speed without
and with the consideration of the environmental uncertainty over a
time sequence of feature points that corresponds to the interval marked
as the rectangular box in Fig. 11.
The environmental uncertainty was considered using Eq. (18), and
Fig. 14 shows that the ship speed uncertainty increases when the en-
vironmental uncertainty is considered.
The probability distributions of the ship speed varying with dif-
ferent environmental conditions are shown in Fig. 15. Here, the RPS
condition is set to be fixed. The figure shows that, as the environmental
disturbances increase, the mean values of the ship speed decrease and
their uncertainty distributions increase. It means that bad weather in-
creases not only the expected time of arrival (ETA) but also its variance.

4.2.2. Engine power

Fig. 13. Predicted speed-power curves in different Beaufort scale conditions at
zero-trim and design draft.
Fig. 16 shows the uncertainties of the engine power without and
with the consideration of the environmental uncertainties over a time
sequence of feature points that corresponds to the interval marked as
the rectangular box in Fig. 12.
As was the case with the ship speed, the uncertainty of the required
engine power increases when the environmental uncertainty is con-
sidered. The probability distributions of the engine power p(PB|n, O, W)
which vary with the environmental disturbances under the same RPS
conditions are estimated and shown in Fig. 17. As the environmental
disturbances increase, the mean and the spread of uncertainty dis-
tribution of the engine power increase.

7
B. Yoo, J. Kim
Fig. 15. Probability distributions of the ship speed varying with environmental
conditions.
Fig. 16. Estimated uncertainty of engine power before and after considering the
environmental uncertainties.
5. Conclusion
This paper presented a new procedure for modeling the powering
performance of a full-scale ship using the ship's operational data and
weather data. For this, graphical models were constructed to design the
model structure for regression, and the regression models for the speed
and engine power of the ship were formulated using machine learning
techniques. Specifically, Gaussian Processes were introduced to model
complicated environmental uncertainty effects. In order to minimize
the risk of overfitting in regression, the domain knowledge of ship
propulsion was incorporated into the GP-based regression model. In
addition, the modeling uncertainty was considered and quantitatively
evaluated in the obtained regression models. The result of this study
can be used for optimizing the ship's operational settings in various
weather conditions. The distribution of the travel time and the total fuel
consumption can be predicted over any path segment. Therefore, we
expect that the proposed method can be directly extended and applied
to optimal weather routing.
8
Applied Ocean Research 82 (2019) 1–9
Fig. 17. Probability distributions of the engine power varying with environ-
mental conditions.
Acknowledgement
This research was the part of ‘Modeling of Ship Navigation
Performance and Application of Logged Operational Data’ with a sup-
port of Samsung Heavy Industries Co., Ltd., Korea.
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