Predicting main engine power and emissions for container, cargo, and tanker ships with artificial neural network analysis

The most significant aspect of international shipping is sea transportation, and the developments to be made in maritime transport will inspire and predict all other fields. Therefore, determining a ship’s main engine power has great importance in terms of both energy efficiency and environmental factors. The maritime transport and shipping industry has currently begun to understand the importance of artificial intelligence technology. This study uses an artificial neural network (ANN) model to predict the main engine power and pollutant emissions of container, cargo, and tanker ships over 14 parameters: maximum speed, average speed, breadth, year built, ship type, status, length overall (LOA), light displacement, summer displacement, fuel type, deadweight tonnage (DWT), gross tonnage, engine cylinder size, and engine stroke length. In order to provide accurate results, the ANN analysis was trained with data from 3,020 ships, which is quite high compared to the studies in the literature. Many ANN models have been developed and compared to achieve minimal errors and highest accuracy in the results. The regression values, which involve the training, validation, and test values for the different ship types, were obtained as 0.99773 for container ships, 0.98964 for cargo ships, and 0.97755 for tanker ships, with a value of 0.97189 for all ships. The ANN structure was tested using many variations for hidden neuron counts, with the ANN analysis made with 30 neurons obtaining the best results. The ANN analysis results were compared with real values, which showed that very accurate results had been obtained according to the mean squared error (MSE), regression, and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) results. The MSE value had exceeded 20,000 in the two-input ANN model, but decreased to 0.03, 0.081, and 0.13 with the 14-input model for container, cargo, and tanker ships, respectively. In order to make accurate predictions with maximum precision in the ANN analyses, the study attempted to use different values for the numbers of hidden neurons and inputs and then presented the performance results. The developed model can be used in future studies to be done on fuel consumption and energy efficiency for ships in maritime transport.