New Insights into the Propulsion Power Prediction of Cruise Ships

Ship propulsion is the largest consumer of energy - and by extension fuel - on cruise ships. Improving its efficiency is thus an important aspect of energy management, both for environmental and economic reasons. Various approaches have been detailed in the literature for improving propulsion efficiency, ranging from optimal voyage planning to prediction of propulsion power or fuel consumption using Machine Learning algorithms, trained on high frequency sensor data. On this latter topic, the approaches typically involve a series of data transformations and time-aggregations (windowing), followed by shuffling and separation of data points into train and validation sets. However, this approach leads to very similar data in the train and validation sets, preventing trained models to generalize well on future ship voyages. In this article we highlight methodological issues and give insights on how to tackle them to train models that focus on optimizing generalizability, especially predictive accuracy on unseen future test sets. We present a temporal approach to splitting data into train, validation and test sets. We perform our analysis using simple multilayer perceptron architectures, of distinct dimensions. Our study concludes that smaller/simpler models, trained on temporal-split data have a lower error when predicting on unseen future test data, compared to larger models and usage of shuffle-split datasets, while also providing better confidence in model accuracy, due to reduced discrepancy between obtained validation and test errors.