ABSTRACT
In weather routing one is about to find the most suitable ocean’s route for a vessel, taking into account changeable weather conditions and navigational constraints. One of the first approaches to the problem was a minimum time route planning based on a weather forecast called an isochrone method. The method was based on geometrically determined and recursively defined time fronts, so called isochrones. Originally proposed by R.W. James (James 1957), isochrone method was in wide use through decades. In late seventies based on the original isochrone method the first computeraided weather routing tools were developed. However, along with computer implementation some problems arose, i.e. with so called “isochrone loops”. Numerous improvements to the method were proposed since early eighties, with (Hagiwara 1989, Spaans 1986, Wis´niewski 1991) among others. Since then several different approaches to the optimisation problem was in use, with dynamic programming (Bijlsma 2004) or genetic and evolutionary algorithms (Wis´niewski et al. 2005) among others.
