MariData is a project funded by BMWI that aims to enable a deterministic analysis of a ship’s energy demand based on environmental and physical conditions. It sensibly delineates the energy demands of various sources to provide tools for an energy optimized ship routing and management. This leads to suggested routing alternatives, speed and trim adjustments or additional services on the ship hull.

MariGeoRoute is a subproject addressing the challenges related to needs arising from the various data demands, such as nautical maps, weather records and forecasts raging from wind and temperature to wave heights and currents. 52°North develops an integrated data store, the GeoPlatform, which will provide data for on shore services as well as for the ships at sea. It needs to sensibly subset and preprocess the data to reduce data load. We will also develop approaches based on machine learning (ML) to model the energy demand based on the data collected and derived from the consortial partners. A routing service developed by 52°North will use the data accessible in the GeoPlatform to provide routing alternatives along the smallest energy demands under constraints of nautical limitations, ship safety and delivery schedules.

In 2021, 52°North completed a detailed and extended requirements analysis of the entire MariData system, including the Decision Support System onboard and the GeoPlatform deployed in the cloud. We evaluated the first concepts and options according to their suitability. Our team also developed and deployed several modules constituting the entire GeoPlatform. An environmental data retrieval Web Application to support the research partners allows for the retrieval of various recorded environmental data sets across different data providers in a unified interface. Specifying the spatial and temporal extent along with the set of desired variables suffices to retrieve an integrated multi variable space-time cube as a single NetCDF-file. We designed the API integration that delivers the energy demand based on a set of surrogate models, as well as, developed and discussed the provision of the route-optimized data cubes with the MariData consortium.