Naval Postgraduate School student Navy Lt.
Cmdr. Korban Blackburn is developing an optimization tool dubbed the Optimized
Transit Tool Easy Reference, or OTTER, which has the
potential to save the Navy millions in fuel costs.
“Lieutenant Commander Blackburn’s thesis
work is contributing to the important problem of reducing fuel consumption in
the fleet. Reduced fuel consumption means lower operational costs, less
sensitivity to volatile fuel prices, and most importantly, reduced resupply
needs -- meaning that ships are able to operate on station longer before they
need to rendezvous with a tanker for refueling,” said Blackburn’s thesis
adviser, NPS Assistant Professor Emily Craparo.
“If I can stay on station for an extra
week without fueling, I have optimized my operational capabilities. That’s the
goal,” Blackburn said.
OTTER is part of Blackburn’s thesis
project at NPS’ Department of Operations Research. Although not fully complete,
it is already garnering attention throughout the fleet and was recently awarded
the Athena Project’s Waterfront Athena Eight Admiral Sims Award for
Intellectual Courage. The Athena Project bills itself as an “innovation-fueled
initiative to make the Navy better through powerful ideas, unique solutions and
intellectual courage.”
Finding
Most Fuel Efficient Speeds
OTTER is used to determine the most fuel
efficient speeds at which to travel between two given points and helps mission
planners to take into account the effects of various speed combinations while
incorporating the impact of group transits and other variables when conducting
mission planning.
“Every ship has a fuel burn-rate curve,
which shows how much fuel you burn for a given speed,” Blackburn explained.
“Think of gears in your car. Would you rather go fifty miles per hour down the
freeway in first gear or fifth gear? There is one gear that is the most efficient
for a given speed. OTTER helps us to determine which gear that is.”
What OTTER demonstrates is seemingly
counterintuitive. On a Littoral Combat Ship, for example, if you were ordered
to steam at 17 knots for 24 hours, the average person in open water would
likely set the ship’s speed at 17 knots and keep it there until he or she
reached their destination. But OTTER reveals that by steaming forward at 15
knots for 90 percent of the time and traveling at 25 knots for ten percent of
the time, you would still be able to travel at an average rate of 17 knots over
a 24-hour period, but would save more than 400 gallons of fuel per hour.
Blackburn’s work builds upon work done by
NPS Professor of Practice Jeffrey Kline, Distinguished Operations Research
Professor Gerald Brown, Distinguished OR Professor Alan Washburn, and the late
Distinguished OR Professor Richard Rosenthal, which led to a 2007 patent for a
ship’s Transit Fuel Planner.
“The Transit Fuel Planner advises a
specific ship, based on its own fuel consumption curves, what is the most fuel
efficient engineering plant configuration and combinations of speeds to transit
a certain distance in a certain time,” Kline said.
Building
on Prior Work
“[Blackburn] looked at this prior work
and recognized that in order for this insight to be most useful, we need to
take into account various operational realities,” Craparo said. “One thing to
consider is that ships often travel together in a battle group rather than
alone as individuals. For a battle group composed of different types of ships,
it’s not so straightforward to determine what speeds the ships should travel in
order to achieve a certain average speed.
“If the ships are assigned very different
speeds, they may become too widely separated while in transit, even if they all
arrive at the destination at the same time,” she continued. “Lieutenant
Commander Blackburn is also considering how to incorporate drills into the
battle group’s transit plan.”
Kline got the initial idea for The
Transit Fuel Planner when he took command of the USS Aquilla after graduating
from NPS. Even in its rudimentary state, Kline was able to realize significant
fuel savings by utilizing the system. He eventually returned to NPS and
collaborated with members of the OR department under an Officer of Naval
Research program before securing the Transit Fuel Planner patent.
Blackburn’s OTTER program simplifies the Transit
Fuel Planner, and makes it more user-friendly by graphing the results of
various algorithms and reproducing them in a simple, easy-to-follow chart.
“I wanted to make the [Transit Fuel
Planner] easy to use. I developed an Excel spreadsheet that can be given to
someone aboard a destroyer, cruiser or any fuel-burning Navy ship. Sailors
won’t need a laptop or anything. It’s literally just a piece of paper,”
Blackburn said.
Collaboration
Produces Results
Blackburn also worked closely with former
NPS intern Brandon Naylor while developing OTTER. Naylor came to NPS as an ONR
Naval Research Enterprise Internship intern. While at NPS, he worked at the
university’s Energy Academic Group exploring the applicability of various
ship-board efficiencies recommended by former NPS student Navy Lt. Dustin
Crawford in a thesis titled, “Alternative Practices to Improve Surface Fleet
Fuel Efficiency.”
Naylor eventually developed the Fuel
Usage Study Extended Demonstration program to test variant combinations of
efficiencies in Crawford’s thesis.
“I developed a program that allows me to
set up to ten battle groups and factor in schedules for them. You can build up
different sets of policies with different constraints and compare how much fuel
has been used per group, per hour,” Naylor said.
Naylor also spoke to subject matter
experts and sailors throughout the surface Navy to ensure that his algorithms
were capable of accurately predicting fuel usage in a variety of different
maritime conditions and within operationally imposed restraints, an effort that
helped Blackburn to solve some of the underlying problems that make OTTER
possible.
Similar developments and collaboration
between researchers at NPS and ONR have made programs like OTTER successful in
in the past. Blackburn hopes that OTTER will contribute to efforts in the areas
of conservation, operational research, and efficiency