There is a strong interest in the maritime community to optimise sailing time, reduce fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions and minimise maintenance costs. The objective of the NAVTRONIC project is to develop a sail planning system to help sea master optimise these criteria.

The proposed solution mimics the current human sail planning process. It will monitor actual ship performance and assimilate this information in the sail plan optimisation process.

The access and systematic exploitation of this ground truth information will provide the unique capability of building “system experience”, constantly improving the performance of different sub-models used in the sail plan optimiser. The system will automatically and continuously compute and communicate optimised sail plans to a vessel. All relevant information justifying the results will be sent simultaneously.

The NAVTRONIC project is highly end-user driven – the largest market players in the maritime community are partners and support the project with human resources, vessels and infrastructures for tests and evaluation.

Facts and figures

Over 90% of European external trade and 43% of internal is going by maritime transport.

Shipping is estimated to emit as high as 4.5% of total global CO₂ emissions.

NAVTRONIC project is funded 3.58 Mio € funding from FP7 EC. The total budget is 5,394 Mio € and the duration 36 months.

Targeted impacts of NAVTRONIC project:

• 90% accurancy in Estimated Time of arrival

• 7% savings on fuel consumption

• 7% savings of CO₂, SO_x and PM emissions

• 15% extension of the service life of ships

• 20% savings with respect to maintenance and inspection costs