An Assessment of Weather Routing Sensitivities for Maritime Path Planning during El Niño

Weather-impacted asset routing poses a significant challenge for Naval operations due to the dynamic and uncertain nature of meteorological and oceanographic impacts to the vessel over time. This works expands upon our previously published tool for multi-objective planning and asset routing, termed TMPLAR. TMPLAR is an AI-driven, model-based decision support system comprising multiple objective optimized path planning algorithms to efficiently route assets, while considering objectives such as fuel efficiency, ship responses (rigid hull characteristics), voyage time, and adherence to operational constraints. The tool directly ingests forecasted meteorological and oceanographic parameters for optimization and has been applied to routing problems that span days to weeks. We present our validation of the tool’s benefits for operational ship path planning by examining routes optimizing around Wave Watch 3 forecasts for the El Niño years of 2016, 2018, and 2019, for six origin/destination pairs around the globe, and subsequently evaluating on European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts Reanalysis v5 data. Our findings indicate that there may be a potential for hundreds of million dollars in fuel savings and significant hazardous impact reduction to ships voyaging across the oceans, which, in turn, would decrease the frequency and cost of required future ship maintenance.