EcoRouter is a cloud-hosted decision-support platform — see the EcoRouter UI — for vessel voyage planning. From any browser a planner can build reference-route corridors between two ports, configures an optimisation case, and receives a complete Pareto front of routes balancing transit time against energy consumption under live forecast or historical weather.
EcoRouter started with the EcoRouter IPN project (2022–2024) funded by The Research Council of Norway and industry partners Kristian Gerhard Jebsen Skipsrederi (project owner), Odfjell Tankers and OSM-Thome (previously OSM). Further, EcoRouter was substantially extended in the Horizon Europe DYNAPORT project, where the optimisation engine was rebuilt and a new web-based GUI was added.
What it does
- Strategic: Test new technologies before they reach production — wind-assisted propulsion, alternative hull shapes, novel power trains — by running thousands of synthetic voyages under historical weather.
- Tactical: Fleet performance analysis. Compare departure-time options, hull variants and weather scenarios; quantify the energy and safety impact of each.
- Operational: Online weather routing for safe, energy-efficient routes with just-in-time arrival, using live ECMWF / Copernicus forecasts.
Key capabilities
- Three case modes — Optimisation (single voyage), Comparison (two ships, identical scenario) and Analysis (departure-time sweep producing a sensitivity curve over a planning horizon).
- Reference-route library — auto-generated, drawn manually, or imported from RTZ / CSV with full metadata preserved.
- Weather playback along a route — wind, waves and currents are animated as a spatial field; the vessel marker advances waypoint-by-waypoint and reports exactly the conditions encountered.
- Per-user isolated compute — a dedicated Azure container for every user, billed only while running and torn down after idle.
- Live job tracking — optimisation progress — graph construction, solver progress, post-processing — streamed to the browser in real time.
- Multi-tenant by design — JWT auth, role-aware access (ADMIN / USER), and an admin toolset for ports, vessels, users and the world-map land mask.
Under the hood
Dynamic Programming over a layered Directed Acyclic Graph of ocean waypoints branches exhaustively across outgoing arcs and the full discrete speed range, evaluating vessel power leg-by-leg from a ShipX-derived interpolation surrogate.
The solver keeps the full Pareto set alive at every node — no scalarisation, no missed trade-off — and prunes legs whose weather conditions exceed user-defined safety limits before any cost is computed. Result: millions of (arc, speed, weather) evaluations finish in minutes instead of days.
Cloud architecture
A permanent API server on Azure (Spring Boot on App Service) handles authentication, persists state in PostgreSQL, and orchestrates a per-user optimisation worker — an Azure Container Instance with 16 vCPU / 64 GB RAM, provisioned on login and torn down after idle. The worker pre-fetches weather grids from Copernicus / ERA5 / ECMWF, runs the DP optimiser, and streams live status back to the browser.
Documentation
For an extended technical description — architecture, optimisation algorithm, GUI walkthrough, admin tooling — see the EcoRouter Technical Brochure (pdf - coming soon). The brochure mirrors the look and feel of other SINTEF software fact sheets.