Evergreen to Trial AI-Based Autonomous Navigation on a Container Ship
Samsung Heavy Industries, ClassNK and Weathernews will verify fuel and emissions savings.
Evergreen Marine is preparing to test an artificial-intelligence-supported autonomous navigation system on at least one of its container ships, aiming to establish how much fuel and emissions the technology can genuinely save rather than simply promising it.
The operator of ultra-large container ships signed a memorandum of understanding with Samsung Heavy Industries, ClassNK and Weathernews to run the trials, with the agreement signed at Evergreen's headquarters. SHI supplies the autonomous navigation module itself; Weathernews provides the meteorological and oceanographic data the system needs to plan a route; ClassNK's role is independent verification.
The module uses an SHI-developed speed optimisation algorithm and, once installed, will control the ship's propulsion and navigation in real time rather than simply advising a human officer. ClassNK will conduct a technical review of the verification methodology itself before independently evaluating the results, a structure meant to keep the fuel-saving claims separate from the vendor supplying the technology.
The Japanese class society was measured about what the trial can actually prove. It said the effectiveness of autonomous navigation, AI routing and weather routeing services varies with weather and sea conditions, vessel condition, and the operational requirements of each individual voyage, and that an appropriate verification methodology is essential precisely because of that variability. That caveat is the point of the exercise: rather than accept a vendor's fuel-saving figures, Evergreen is asking a classification society to check them against real operating conditions.
The test sits inside a wider push across container shipping to lower fuel consumption through smarter routing rather than through hardware alone, as operators face tightening emissions rules without wanting to sacrifice schedule reliability. AI-based voyage optimisation, if it holds up under independent verification, offers a route to lower fuel burn that does not require slowing ships down or accepting a riskier passage — the algorithm is meant to find the efficient route that also avoids incidents and losses, not just the shortest one.
