Prediction of ship power based on variation in deep feed-forward neural network

Fuel oil consumption (FOC) must be minimized to determine the economic route of a ship; hence, the ship power must be predicted prior to route planning. For this purpose, a numerical method using test results of a model has been widely used. However, predicting ship power using this method is challenging owing to the uncertainty of the model test. An onboard test should be conducted to solve this problem; however, it requires considerable resources and time. Therefore, in this study, a deep feed-forward neural network (DFN) is used to predict ship power using deep learning methods that involve data pattern recognition. To use data in the DFN, the input data and a label (output of prediction) should be configured. In this study, the input data are configured using ocean environmental data (wave height, wave period, wave direction, wind speed, wind direction, and sea surface temperature) and the ship's operational data (draft, speed, and heading). The ship power is selected as the label. In addition, various treatments have been used to improve the prediction accuracy. First, ocean environmental data related to wind and waves are preprocessed using values relative to the ship's velocity. Second, the structure of the DFN is changed based on the characteristics of the input data. Third, the prediction accuracy is analyzed using a combination comprising five hyperparameters (number of hidden layers, number of hidden nodes, learning rate, dropout, and gradient optimizer). Finally, k-means clustering is performed to analyze the effect of the sea state and ship operational status by categorizing it into several models. The performances of various prediction models are compared and analyzed using the DFN in this study.