Energy Transition Path

Recently, IMO has agreed to reduce the GHG emissions of shipping by 30% in 2030 and 80% in 2040. This raises tremendous challenges related to the energy transition, as ships which are currently designed will still be around after these transitions. 

Even though much research focuses on the characteristics of new fuels for shipping, these efforts aim at the more distant future of 2030-2050. Ships built in the next 5-10 years will not be able to take action on this, as the technologies are not yet available. How ships should be designed with uncertainty in future fuels is an open question. Ships are complex integrated systems of systems where the change of one parameter will invariably result in changes to others. 

The aim of this work package is to design ships that can adapt to completely new energy systems in the future, without the design becoming too rigid in the considered future, or too expensive to be economically viable now. 

A. Research papers

[1] Zwaginga, J. J., & Pruyn, J. F. (2022, June). An evaluation of suitable methods to deal with deep uncertainty caused by the energy transition in ship design. In SNAME International Marine Design Conference (p. D021S003R002). SNAME.

[2] Zwaginga, J.J., Lagemann, B, Erikstad, S.O., Pruyn, J.J.F., (2023) Optimal ship fuel selection under uncertainty. Presented at the World Conference on Transport Research WCTR 2023 and received best paper award of Topic Area A (Transport modes general). Under review for publication in Sustainability

[3] Kougiatsos, N., Zwaginga, J., Pruyn, J. & Reppa, V. (2023). Semantically enhanced system and automation design of complex marine vessels, to be featured in the Proceedings of the 2023 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI)

B. Master Assignments

[1] Minderhoud, M. (2023). (MSc Thesis). Ship Design for Uncertainty: A Real Options Approach to determine the Value of Design-for-Conversion under Uncertainty. Delft University of Technology. February 2023. https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid:0317693a-7e50-4f46-810f-14617f6c6991.