Optimizing Group Transit in the Gulf of Aden

The situation around the Horn of Africa is critical. The pirates attack transiting vessels on daily basis and even though various counter-piracy measures have been employed, there is still a great potential for the optimization of these navigation techniques. We focus on optimization of a specific transit scheme – combination of the International Recommended Transit Corridor with Group Transits, temporal schedules for ships sailing through the Gulf of Aden. Having a large dataset of ships’ speeds, we employ dynamic programming together with branch and bound technique to optimize the Group Transit schedules, proposing a variety of alternatives. We evaluate the results both statistically, taking into account only distribution of speeds, and dynamically, using a mature multi-agent simulation to verify the superiority of proposed schedules in a dynamic and rich simulated environment. The results of this work show, that even small changes in the current schedules can save days of transit times and millions of US dollars per year.