Pilot 2: Globally Optimal Design of Ship Energy Systems
Ship energy system conceptual design happens at very early phase of ship design when there is only limited amount of information available. Consequently, large uncertainties exist due to the unknown information and inaccurate estimations. This is usually addressed by design margins, which causes over-dimensioning of or imbalance in subsystems and therefore suboptimal design concepts of ship energy systems. Even worse, due to the limited consideration of real operational environment during the design phases, the already suboptimal ship energy systems are often operated off the design points, which consequently leads to lower operational efficiency, and higher life cycle costs and emissions. On the other hand, both model-based and data-driven approaches have been only playing supporting roles in the design of ship energy systems so far. The full potential of simulation methods and huge amount of design and operational data still remains untapped.
Use Cases
During the first evaluation period of the project, the focus of the pilot was on the following use cases
Ship Energy Systems Design through Digital Twins
VTT incorporates AI, Big Data analytics, HPC and hybrid digital twin in the loop of ship energy system design and optimization process so as to achieve more energy- and cost-efficient conceptual designs in both design and practical operations throughout lifecycles, with reduced time, efforts and costs.
Ship Energy Systems Optimisation
VTT’s work on novel maritime technologies addresses the challenges of reducing emissions and increasing the efficiency of global shipping, according to the international targets set by IMO.
Pilot-participating Partners
Pilot Technological Highlights
The technological highlights of this pilot were the following
Pilot Results
VTT is formulating a beyond-the-state-of-the-art framework into a web-based digital service platform for ship energy system conceptual design and optimization, with extended capabilities in AI, big data analytics and HPC. It can generate and handle a large number of design scenarios in hours, instead of days and weeks, leaving a ground-breaking potential for the exploration and experimentation in the conceptual designs. This will help not only to efficiently find globally optimal design and operation of ship energy systems but also to significantly minimize the time, efforts and costs of ship energy system conceptual design and optimization process.