Bakht Zaman

Dusica Marijan, Hamza Haruna Mohammed, Bakht Zaman

To reduce carbon emissions and minimize shipping costs, improving the fuel efficiency of ships is crucial. Various measures are taken to reduce the total fuel consumption of ships, including optimizing vessel parameters and selecting routes with the lowest fuel consumption. Different estimation methods are proposed for predicting fuel consumption, while various optimization methods are proposed to minimize fuel oil consumption. This paper provides a comprehensive review of methods for estimating and optimizing fuel oil consumption in maritime transport. Our novel contributions include categorizing fuel oil consumption \& estimation methods into physics-based, machine-learning, and hybrid models, exploring their strengths and limitations. Furthermore, we highlight the importance of data fusion techniques, which combine AIS, onboard sensors, and meteorological data to enhance accuracy. We make the first attempt to discuss the emerging role of Explainable AI in enhancing model transparency for decision-making. Uniquely, key challenges, including data quality, availability, and the need for real-time optimization, are identified, and future research directions are proposed to address these gaps, with a focus on hybrid models, real-time optimization, and the standardization of datasets.

Bakht Zaman, Luis Miguel Lopez Ramos, Daniel Romero et al.

Causality graphs are routinely estimated in social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering due to their capacity to efficiently represent the spatiotemporal structure of multivariate data sets in a format amenable for human interpretation, forecasting, and anomaly detection. A popular approach to mathematically formalize causality is based on vector autoregressive (VAR) models and constitutes an alternative to the well-known, yet usually intractable, Granger causality. Relying on such a VAR causality notion, this paper develops two algorithms with complementary benefits to track time-varying causality graphs in an online fashion. Their constant complexity per update also renders these algorithms appealing for big-data scenarios. Despite using data sequentially, both algorithms are shown to asymptotically attain the same average performance as a batch estimator which uses the entire data set at once. To this end, sublinear (static) regret bounds are established. Performance is also characterized in time-varying setups by means of dynamic regret analysis. Numerical results with real and synthetic data further support the merits of the proposed algorithms in static and dynamic scenarios.