An artificial intelligence compass from Thessaloniki for maritime transport
He uses her Artificial Intelligence (AI) to achieve highly accurate marine forecasts and help shipping companies better manage their sailing, saving fuel and reducing emissions of air pollutants. The AI models developed by Along the waya new one departure from Thessaloniki, they break through the barriers of physics, learning exactly how it works and manage, based on historical data on a range of marine conditions such as wind, surface waves and current, to predict how they will behave in the future.
In fact, using the tool developed by AlongRoute emissions and energy costs can be reduced by up to 30% through optimal navigation, when with current models the rate of savings through routing weather is between 3% and 10 %. The company has already created a solution that covers the Mediterranean, but the design cannot, with its products, serve the world’s oceans. At this stage, it has even signed non-disclosure contracts with three marine technology companies from Spain, Britain and Germany, so that the first certifications of its predictive models can be made, while it is also receiving attacks from other countries, such as Canada, France and Norway.
Maritime transport is responsible for around 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions, with estimates to double this figure in less than 30 years. Given this situation, the International Maritime Organization has demanded a 70% reduction in emissions by 2050.
The need and the question
Today marine forecasts are derived from specific numerical models that attempt to simulate physics. Despite continuous research, however, it seems that traditional numerical predictive models have their potential mainly due to the chaotic nature of the modeled physical processes and the large computational needs. It was on this gap that AlongRoute was built.
The idea of marrying Artificial Intelligence with marine forecasting came from another company in Thessaloniki, Omikrous Sovoulou Perviolto, in which one of the objects was the marine space. There, oceanographer Georgia Kalantzi, holder of a PhD in marine wave forecasting, began to wonder – in the context of some of the company’s activities – whether Technical Intelligence could help with marine forecasting. “Can AI learn from historical data on sea conditions physics, train itself and lead to accurate predictions of future conditions? That was the question,” explains Georgia Kalantzi.
With this growing concern, Omicron Environmental Consultants got in touch with the German company Alisio Computing -specialist in artificial intelligence- and they submitted a joint proposal to the Digi Circ Blue Economy Accelerators, managing to reach the final phase and receive funding. for their idea. That’s how they created AlongRoute in October 2022. The choice of the maritime field was not accidental. As Georgia Kalantzi explains, the need for reliable data in shipping is very great, due to the large fuel consumption, the exorbitant financial costs, the need for timely arrival at the destination, but also the emissions of gaseous pollutants.
“On ships, in order to have a minimum fuel consumption, you must have a constant speed. You have to avoid falling into some sea system that will force you to increase your speed. If you know the future conditions and configurations depending on your navigation, it can achieve this saving with significant importance both for the environment and for the financial burden” Georgia Kalantzi tells Voria.
In addition to her, Eduardo Pena Vina, Stergios Diamantopoulos, Konstantinos Karystinakis, Apostolia Papadoudi, as well as Omicron Environmental Consultants, participate in the AlongRoute corporate structure.