An Investigation into the Operational Characteristics of High-Speed Crew Boat Based on Artificial Neural Network

Abstract

Estimating shaft power of a crew boat is very important to be analysed because it has high-speed operational characteristics along with limited routes. To understand the phenomena, 3 sister crew-boats with operational distance about 40-60 nautical miles every day are investigated. The daily operational time is 8 hours and the configurations are: 4.04% full speed, 13.63% economical speed, 1.81% slow speed, 7.65% snatching, 1.25% manoeuvring, 5.29% idle, and the remaining time is in standby condition. The crew boats are fitted with a monitoring system namely SHIMOS®, in which data is sent to a server in the centre office every 2 minutes. The data consists of time capture, boat position (latitude and longitude), speed, left and right RPM engine, left and right flow-meter data engine, and average of fuel consumption data in everyday operation. Three years of data has been collected for the vessel. The present study proposed characteristics of crew-boat shaft power, which affected by external factors using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) back propagation method and optimisation in 4 hidden layers and 40 neurons with relative error 6.2%. The results demonstrates good agreement with previous popular method that using statistical models.