The project is a competency project with user involvement (KMB), and it is funded by the Norwegian Research Council (80%), Rolls-Royce Marine AS (10%) and the Fishery and Aquaculture Industry Research Fund (10%).
In addition to SINTEF Fisheries and Aquaculture, NTNU, Rolls-Royce Marine, FHF, the Marine College in Aalesund and the Dutch TNO contribute to the project. The main goal of this project is to develop the skills and tools that can contribute to more energy efficient operation and design of the vessel.
This will be achieved by developing:
- Strategies and tools to aggregate operational data
- Key figures in relation to the operation of vessels
- Systems for operational decision support.
- Numerical methods and tools for optimization of ship design.
The project will contribute to more energy-efficient operation by:
- Maintain current information about the vessel's operation. Partly by means of direct measurements, partly by means of state estimators.
- Key performance indicators will form the basis for presenting the current operation to the captain. These may be extended by comparison to past values, for the same operation and external conditions. It may also be compared to the optimum based on modeling of the operation.
- Model predictive control is used to give specific advice to the captain about how he should operate the vessel. For example, start / stop of auxiliary engines, the choice of pitch / rpm and use of hybrid / diesel electric propulsion.
This will give the captain a better basis for making decisions that affect fuel consumption. In addition, more transparency in relation to energy may provide greater focus and effort for this. 
The project will contribute to more energy-efficient design by:
- Collecting operational data on many vessels over time and accumulate these in a central database.
- The database used to:
- Finding the relationship between energy consumption, weather conditions and the vessel's hull.
- Finding the relationship between energy consumption, weather conditions, operating pattern and energy on board (including propulsion system).
Typical questions would be:
- How large main engine should be chosen?
- How big propeller?
- How many and large auxiliary engines?
- Hybrid, conventional or diesel-electric propulsion?
The data will also be important for the development of design tools based on modeling of the vessel. The project will also finance one PhD student and one post doctor at NTNU.
