Accelerating multi-objective ship routing using a novel grid structure and a simple heuristic

Abstract

In this paper, we present a grid structure used as a base layer for a multi-objective algorithm used to solve the bi-criteria time constrained shortest path problem in ship routing. We also accelerate this algorithm by following two completely different approaches. First, we split the initial grid structure into multiple partitions with uniform weather conditions, in order to reduce the complexity of routing through them. Second, we transform the initially used label setting multi-objective algorithm into a multi-objective A* algorithm and give an efficient heuristic function for doing so. Our experiments show that there is a significant speedup of the algorithm, especially in the second case, where the run time is reduced substantially.