• KIPS Transactions on Computer and Communication Systems
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.79-86
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• 2012

An economic ship routing means to sail a ship with a goal of minimizing the fuel consumption by utilizing weather forecast information, and various such systems have been recently studied. For a successful economic ship routing system, an efficient algorithm is needed to search an optimal geographical path, and most of the previous systems were approaching to that problem through a minimal static-cost path search algorithm based on the Dijkstra algorithm. To apply that kind of search algorithm, the cost of every edge assigned with the estimated fuel consumption should be constant. However, that assumption is not practical at all considering that the actual fuel consumption is determined by the weather condition when the ship will pass the edge. To overcome such a limitation, we propose a new optimal ship routing system based on a minimal dynamic-cost path search algorithm by properly modifying the Dijkstra algorithm. In addition, we propose a method which efficiently reduces the search space by using the $A^*$ algorithm to decrease the running time. We compared our system with the shortest path-based sailing method over ten testing routes and observed that the former reduced the estimated fuel consumption than the latter by 2.36% on average and the maximum 4.82% with little difference of estimated time of arrival.