Flexible Tool Environment for Holistic Retrofits and Decarbonization of Ships

The FIT-HORIZONS project aims to develop an intelligent tool for the design of retrofit solutions for waterborne vessels that will be able to analyse a multitude of different retrofit technologies and their combinations in a holistic manner. This is urgently needed to reduce Green House Gas emissions from the maritime fleet and meet the EU’s ambitious climate ambitions as waterborne vessels have an expected lifetime of between 25-50 years. However, today’s design tools are evaluating each retrofit technology independently and they cannot analyse the total retrofit design space within reasonable time, which means that ship owners cannot be sure that the retrofit solutions are the best for a given vessel. FIT-HORIZONS aims to solve this by using a machine learning-based multi-fidelity approach and combining operational and experimental data series, advanced AI models, and advanced dimensionality techniques to build surrogate models that will then be used to construct 6 synthesis models representing each of the 6 ship types defined by the ZEWT Partnership. Moreover, a cost-benefit model will be integrated with the synthesis models to consider regulatory compliance and LCA metrics across the vessels’ lifetime. Together, this will allow for a flexible and efficient design process in which multiple combinations of retrofit technologies can be analysed at the same time to identify optimal retrofit solutions for a given vessel. Finally, virtual demonstrations will be carried out where ship designers will collaborate with ship owners to design 6 optimised retrofit solutions for vessels from each of the 6 ship types that will be ready to be adopted onboard the vessels after the project ends. The FIT-HORIZONS consortium is composed of 14 companies with industrial/commercial interest in the project results (3 ship designers, 6 ship operators, 2 retrofit technology developers, 2 software developers, and 1 classification society), 4 research organisations, and 1 maritime cluster.