Predicting ships' CO2 emissions using feature-oriented methods

Shipping companies are forced by the current EU regulation to set up a system for monitoring, reporting, and verification of harmful emissions from their fleet. In this regulatory background, data collected from onboard sensors can be utilized to assess the ship's operating conditions and quantify its CO2 emission levels. The standard approach for analyzing such data sets is based on summarizing the measurements obtained during a given voyage by the average value. However, this compression step may lead to significant information loss since most variables present a dynamic profile that is not well approximated by the average value only. Therefore, in this work, we test two feature-oriented methods that are able to extract additional features, namely, profile-driven features (PdF) and statistical pattern analysis (SPA). A real data set from a Ro-Pax ship is then considered to test the selected methods. The data set is segregated according to the voyage distance into short, medium, and long routes. Both PdF and SPA are compared with the standard approach, and the results demonstrate the benefits of employing more systematic and informative feature-oriented methods. For the short route, no method is able to predict CO2 emissions in a satisfactory way, whereas for the medium and long routes, regression models built using features obtained from both PdF and SPA improve their prediction performance. In particular, for the long route, the standard approach failed to provide reasonably good predictions.