On Assessment of Efficiency of Weather Routing Algorithms

Abstract

The article discusses the general setting of two basic weather routing problems and proposes measures for evaluating the effectiveness of algorithms for solving them, which are independent of the peculiarities of their implementation. The construction of the optimal route is intended to be carried out in several stages: generation of the initial set of allowable routes, their optimization, and selection of the best route according to the chosen criterion. For the first stage, the possibility of using the variant of the A* algorithm was studied, taking into account the specified sailing time and changing the speed of the vessel. It is proposed to discretize the search space for the third dimension (time) by solving the optimization problem of choosing a set speed on a route section. As an illustration of the capabilities of the three-dimensional version of the algorithm, examples of calculations of several routes with an assessment of its effectiveness are given in comparison with the version of the algorithm that uses a constant travel speed as a parameter for both types of problems. It is shown that the possibility of obtaining high-quality economical routes for the three-dimensional version of the algorithm is achieved only with a certain choice of parameters, and is characterized by significantly higher computational costs. For the problem of constructing routes with a given length, a three-dimensional version of the algorithm provides better route quality, but also due to increased computational costs.

Keywords

• weather routing
• performance evaluation
• comparison of algorithms