Ocean Waves Estimation : An Artificial Intelligence Approach

Abstract: This thesis aims to solve the mathematical inverse problem of characterizing sea waves based on the responses obtained from a marine vessel sailing under certain sea conditions. By researching this problem the thesis contributes to the marine industry by improving products that are using ocean behavior for controlling ship's dynamics. Knowledge about the current state of the sea, such as the wave frequency and height, is important for navigation, control, and for the safety of a vessel. This information can be retrieved from specialized weather reports. However, such information is not at all time possible to obtain during a voyage, and if so usually comes with a certain delay. Therefore this thesis seeks solutions that can estimate on-line the waves' state using methods in the field of Artificial Intelligence. The specific investigation methods are Transfer Functions augmented with Genetic Algorithm, Artificial Neural Networks and Case-Based Reasoning. These methods have been configured and validated using the n-fold cross validation method. All the methods have been tested with an actual implementation. The algorithms have been trained with data acquired from a marine simulation program developed in Simulink. The methods have also been trained and tested using monitored data acquired from an actual ship sailing on the Baltic Sea as well as wave data obtained from a buoy located nearby the vessel's route. The proposed methods have been compared with state-of-the art reports in order evaluate the novelty of the research and its potential applications in industry. The results in this thesis show that the proposed methods can in fact be used for solving the inverse problem. It was also found that among the investigated methods it is the Transfer Function augmented with Genetic Algorithm which yields best results. This Master Thesis is conducted under the Master of Engineering Program in Robotics at Mälardalens högskola in Västerås, Sweden. The thesis was proposed by Q-TAGG R&D AB in Västerås, Sweden, a company which specializes in marine vessel dynamics research.