Operational cycles for maritime transportation: A benchmarking tool for ship energy efficiency

Benchmarking the energy efficiency of ships is not a straightforward task, mainly due to the diversity of operations. Although driving cycles have been used for decades in evaluating the performance of road vehicles, these do not exist in formal policy-making for maritime transport. This work builds on a previously proposed methodology. It uses noon reports of 327 vessels for 2019 to construct operational cycles for seven size classes of container ships using the main engine power as the main parameter. Concerning the main engine emissions, the resulting cycles reduce variation in the carbon intensity indicator values by more than 30% while maintaining an average accuracy of 97.7% in absolute emissions. These figures show that the concept can improve operational carbon intensity indicators in terms of robustness and their technical counterparts in optimizing ship design. The paper also proposes further work required for benchmarking applications in policy-making.