Abstract
Weather routing (WR) is a critical component of maritime operations, directly impacting fuel efficiency, voyage duration, and navigational safety. We present VFWR (VESSELFRONT Weather Routing), an optimization framework for ship weather routing based on the A* path-finding algorithm with a weather-aware heuristic incorporating real-time forecast, wave height threshold, maximum latitude constraint, no-go areas, and minimization of the duration of time within emission control area (ECA). To ensure accuracy based on the updated forecasts, re-routing is performed at six-hour intervals throughout the trip. VFWR is validated against a dataset of 100 historical voyages using hindcast weather data, while calculating optimized routes in a median of 23 seconds and consistently producing shorter distances and durations than real-world trips across all tested voyages.