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With the effects of global warming, the North Sea Route has become an economic option for cargo transportation because of the shorter distance between East Asia and Europe. Generally, conventional mechanical propulsion systems installed in icecapable tankers suffer from significant drawbacks because of poor fuel efficiency when sailing at low speed, therefore, advanced technologies have been applied such as diesel electric and nuclear-powered propulsion; however, drawbacks still exist. Hybrid propulsion is a more environmental-friendly, economical solution for ships with icebreaking capability, which can address the drawbacks in both diesel electric and nuclear power systems. In this paper, modeling of system components is presented and implemented inMATLAB Simulink. A primary control strategy is applied to the system to ensure system stability, and an advanced secondary strategy is developed and applied to the power sources to minimize fuel consumption. Given two scenarios, the simulation results of the hybrid propulsion systemdeveloped in this research and those of diesel electric propulsion systems with DC and AC distribution systems are compared and indicate that the hybrid system can offer up to 22.4% fuel savings over iceloading condition, and 39.5% fuel reduction over the particular voyage of varying speed in open water is applied in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) are vessels that operate without any crew onboard. There is an increased demand for USVs in recent years, particularly for the use of water quality monitoring and ocean data mapping. In China, USVs are widely used as a luring fish boat which acts as the assisting boat of light luring seine vessel. One of the main problems of such boat is that the traditional propulsion system is poorly matched with the high energy consumption that is required during certain specific operation, which results in poor vessel performance. A hybrid electric propulsion systemconfiguration solution is proposed to increase the overall propulsion efficiency of such USVs. The typical operating profile was identified and a comprehensive simulation was conducted to demonstrate the compatibility during vessel operations. An intelligent equipment selection analysis was also carried out to recommend the optimal equipment selection by considering a multiobjective problem. The result shows that the configuration solution proposed can reduce fuel consumption and the optimal intelligent selection method can provide a suitable selection solution for decision makers. This article highlights an energy management strategy focusing on the threshold method based on support vector machine pattern recognition. A multiobjective particle swarm optimization algorithm based on the dynamic inertia weight and chaotic motion was used to optimize the equipment selection by considering fuel consumption and emissions. The proposed propulsion system configuration and equipment selection solution can be implemented for the design of USVs, which has a routine fixed operating pattern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]