Development and Real-Time Performance Evaluation of Energy Management Strategy for a Dynamic Positioning Hybrid Electric Marine Vessel

Hybridisation of energy sources in marine vessels has been recognized as one of the feasible solutions to improve fuel economy and achieve global emission reduction targets in the maritime sector. However, the overall performance of a hybrid vessel system is strongly dependent on the efficiency of the energy management system (EMS) that regulates the power-flow amongst the propulsion sources and the energy storage system (ESS). This study develops a simple but production-feasible and efficient EMS for a dynamic positioning (DP) hybrid electric marine vessel (HEMV) and real-time experimental evaluation within a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation environment. To support the development and evaluation, map-based performance models of HEMVs’ key components are developed. Control logics that underpin the EMS are then designed and verified. Real-time performance evaluation to assess the performance and applicability of the proposed EMS is conducted, showing the improvement over those of the conventional control strategies. The comparison using key performance indicators (KPIs) demonstrates that the proposed EMS could achieve up to 4.8% fuel saving per voyage, while the overall system performance remains unchanged as compared to that of the conventional vessel.