Case Studies on PLS-Based Procedure for Ship Fuel Consumption Monitoring and Fault Detection

The new Regulation (EU 2015/757) of the European Union Council, based on the International Maritime Organization guidelines, urges shipping companies to adopt systems for monitoring, reporting and verifying CO2 emissions through the analysis of ship fuel consumption. The novel procedure presented in Bocchetti et al. (2015) points out that Partial Least-Squares (PLS) methods could be successfully utilized (at the end of each voyage) by exploiting the navigation data overload collected on board by modern data acquisition systems. In this work, the procedure has been elaborated and implemented on Grimaldi Group’s twin cruise ships operating in the Adriatic Sea. Different case studies are presented to validate the procedure ability of alerting management for a possible change in ship performances as well as detecting anomalies in navigation variables (i.e., fault detection) that need further technological investigation. Moreover, the procedure is newly applied for estimating the fuel consumption reduction consequent to efficiency improvement operations (e.g., hull form optimization, hull cleaning and propeller polishing, ultra-smooth coating, propulsion efficiency improvement, engine maintenance operation, power plant efficiency improvement). This feature is particularly profitable for shipping companies and operators to quantify ship efficiency gain and therefore, to claim for carbon credits.