Whale Optimization Algorithm for Ship Path Optimization in Large-Scale Complex Marine Environment

With the formulation of United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, marine pollution has received widespread attention from various countries. Green navigation is an important requirement for route planning, in which energy consumption is its primary focus. Ships are affected by complex marine meteorological environments, so it is difficult to plan a reasonable route. Some methods have been proposed to solve this problem, but there are some shortcomings, such as no consideration of the effect of wind direction, wind speed and wave. To solve this problem, we introduce a meta-heuristic whale optimization algorithm (WOA), which helps ships find a low-energy-consumption and safe route in a large-scale complex marine environment. The results of our simulation experiments indicate that WOA is more competitive than other state-of-the-art algorithms for route planning.