Green AI for Sustainable Shipping

The maritime industry is facing enormous pressure to reduce GHG emissions from shipping, which currently amount to 3% of global GHG emissions. To help the shipping industry decarbonize, international regulatory bodies have imposed demanding measures on the maritime sector, e.g., IMO CII, EU ETS, Fuel EU, etc. The large CO2 footprint of shipping is widely attributed to inefficient use of energy due to non-optimized voyage planning and/or execution. It has been estimated before that implementing energy efficiency measures alone could provide more than 40% of the CO2 cuts required to meet our global warming targets. Motivated by this insight, GASS will develop and deploy a data-driven solution for shipping decarbonization using state-of-the-art machine learning and digital twin technologies to improve the energy efficiency of voyages through a range of operations including vessel and voyage optimized routing and speed. The added value of the GASS solution will be in enabling vessel owners and operators to significantly reduce GHG emissions and contribute to the green transition, improve vessel and voyage performance to remain profitable, as well as to comply with new regulations and charter party agreements.

The shipping industry has an important milestone to reach in only 7 years – halve greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from shipping, which currently amount to 1.2 GT of CO2 equivalents yearly. An important factor contributing to such a large CO2 footprint of shipping is the inefficient use of energy due to non-optimized voyage planning and/or execution. Existing solutions to this problem rely on sparse data sources and simplified assumptions about a vessel and its environment when optimizing vessel and voyage performance, resulting in suboptimal energy usage. GASS will challenge these established solutions and develop novel AI-enhanced technology and Go2Market services for enabling sustainable shipping by leveraging massive data sources to improve the energy efficiency of voyages through a range of operations including optimized voyage routing and speed. The added value will be in enabling vessel owners and operators to reduce GHG emissions and contribute to the green transition, improve vessel and voyage performance to remain profitable, as well as to comply with new regulations and charter party agreements. The GASS consortium is uniquely positioned to realize the project ambition, being an interdisciplinary team gathering leading Norwegian maritime companies with the roles of digital maritime technology provider NAVTOR (NVT), maritime data provider ScanReach (SCAN), ship owners Grieg Star (GS) and SinOceanic Shipping (SS), top academic expertise in machine learning in maritime Simula (SRL), maritime industry cluster Maritime Cleantech (MC), and Katapult test center Sustainable Energy (SE).