TwinShip consortium reviews first year accomplishments and plans next steps

In February, the TwinShip Horizon Europe Project consortium met at the Port Authority in Valencia for its second General Assembly. We just recently completed our first year, so this was a great opportunity to wrap up our accomplishments and discuss next steps towards reaching our ambitious goal.

52°North’s contribution to the project is its expertise in voyage optimization, as well as use and development of our WeatherRoutingTool.

In the first year, our main focus was on:

• Improving the implementation of the genetic algorithm
• Implementing ship speed optimization to better support real-world use cases. This is work-in-progress and the goal is to allow the following scenarios: 1) optimize ship speed along a fixed route, 2) optimize waypoints with a fixed ship speed and 3) simultaneously optimize ship speed and waypoints.
• Providing a comprehensive user documentation, which is now available via https://52north.github.io/WeatherRoutingTool/

Our team is currently working on further improving and validating ship speed optimization. We will provide a REST API for the WeatherRoutingTool to be used by our project partners and integrate fuel consumption models of the TwinShip pilot vessels provided by the project partners.

In addition to the many presentations and fruitful discussions, we had a field trip to the Port of Valencia. It was impressive to see one of the EU’s largest container ports close up and get an impression of the complex logistics necessary to keep such a system running.

And of course, when in Valencia, you must have some delicious paella!

All in all, the general assembly was quite a success. We are all making good progress and are on (even ahead of) schedule! We look forward to continued cooperation on this challenging and important topic.