Marcin Życzkowski

Rapid urban growth and climate pressure on coastal zones are increasing interest in Floating Architecture (FA) as an extension of urban infrastructure into marine environments. The feasibility of such developments depends strongly on the reliability and efficiency of transport systems connecting offshore structures with coastal transport networks. Environmental conditions, particularly wave-induced ship motions, can affect the performance and safety of shuttle vessels serving these installations.This study investigates whether FA locations can be optimized to maintain reliable offshore transport accessibility while satisfying vessel safety constraints. The proposed Floating Architecture Location Optimizer (FALO) integrates port location, sailing distance, sea-state statistics, and deterministic weather routing constrained by the Second Generation Intact Stability Criteria (SGISC).Application to three European coastal regions shows that vessel dynamic stability influences directional transport accessibility. The results indicate that spatial planning of floating developments can improve transport reliability and support sustainable short-sea transport systems.

Sailboat weather routing is a highly complex problem in terms of both the computational time and memory. The reason for this is a large search resulting in a multitude of possible routes and a variety of user preferences. Analysing all possible routes is only feasible for small sailing regions, low-resolution maps, or sailboat movements on a grid. Therefore, various heuristic approaches are often applied, which can find solutions within an acceptable time, sacrificing their optimality and accuracy. In this study, we propose a different approach based on the parallel implementation of an exact algorithm. Specifically, we present a Sailing Assistance Application (SAA) utilizing a deterministic approach and show how it can be parallelized in a cloud environment to reduce its execution time. The potential of the proposed parallelization method goes beyond the particular presented solution; it can be used to improve the performance of other weather routing tools such as collision avoidance and related applications.

Weather data is nowadays used in a variety of navigational and ocean engineering research problems: from the obvious ones like voyage planning and routing of sea-going vessels, through the analysis of stability-related phenomena, to detailed modelling of ships’ manoeuvrability for collision avoidance purposes. Apart from that, weather forecasts are essential for passenger cruises and fishing vessels that want to avoid the risk associated with severe hydro-meteorological conditions. Currently, there is a wide array of services that offer weather predictions. These services include the original sources – services that make use of their own infrastructure and research models – as well as those that further postprocess the data obtained from the original sources. The existing services also differ in their update frequency, area coverage, geographical resolution, natural phenomena taken into account and finally – output file formats. In the course of the ROUTING project, primarily addressing ship weather routing accounting for changeable weather conditions, the necessity arose to prepare a report on the state-of-the-art in numerical weather prediction (NWP) modelling. Based on the report, this paper offers a thorough review of the existing weather services and detailed information on how to access the data offered by these services. While this review has been done with transoceanic ship routing in mind, hopefully it will also be useful for a number of other applications, including the already mentioned collision avoidance solutions.

The article presents a method to determine the route of a sailing vessel with the aid of deterministic algorithms. The method assumes that the area in which the route is to be determined is limited and the basic input data comprise the wind vector and the speed characteristic of the vessel. Compared to previous works of the authors, the present article additionally takes into account the effect of sea waves with the resultant resistance increase on the vessel speed. This approach brings the proposed model closer to real behaviour of a sailing vessel. The result returned by the method is the sailing route, optimised based on the multi-criteria objective function. Along with the time criterion, this function also takes into account comfort of voyage and the number of performed turns. The developed method has been implemented as simulation application SaillingAssistance and experimentally verified.