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New feature highlight: weather on custom route waypoints 🌦️

· 3 min read

Model with weather along the routes in simulation​

We're excited to launch Weather Along the Route, a powerful new feature in our simulation platform.

  • It delivers dynamic, route-specific weather forecasts for vessels—from long-haul transits to final site approach.
  • Enables you to efficiently plan projects, with real-time conditions integrated into routing.
  • Accurately estimate weather-related downtime and improve reliability in scheduling.

This release sets a new benchmark for logistics and operational planning across energy projects.

Current limitation:

The simulations only considers weather at the port for port activities, and wind farm weather for transit and task. This creates a blind spot. Especially for long-haul transits where vessels pass through regions with drastically changing weather. Leading to underestimated waiting time and inaccurate downtime forecasting.

Whats New:

With this release, simulations now evaluate weather conditions at every waypoint along a vessel’s route.

This improvement specifically applies to vessels using the process builder, such as towing vessels and Heavy Lift Vessels (HLVs). These vessel types often face complex, multi-leg transits where realistic sea conditions are critical.

In the process builder, all transit processes should now include a new parameter:
max wait time on waypoint

This setting allows you to define how long a vessel can pause at a waypoint waiting for suitable weather before proceeding. It works similarly to the max wait before start between two process steps:

Key Benefits:

By accounting for weather conditions across the entire route, this feature delivers significantly more accurate transit and downtime estimates. That improved precision strengthens project planning, business cases, informs smarter logistical decisions, and helps ensure schedules stay on track.

Technical Overview:

As an enhancement to the existing route planner, the weather on route option allows you to add weather and the power law exponent options to the existing latitude, longitude, wait time and speed limit parameters.

Which means:

  • The simulation now reflects changing weather conditions along the full journey, not just at the port and destination.
  • You can model more realistic cases- especially for long transits where weather can vary a lot in between waypoints.
  • Using actual weather files at each waypoint, the model can account for delays and waiting time if conditions are bad ahead.
  • The power law exponent lets you adjust how wind changes with height, giving more accurate vessel speed and travel time estimates.

Together, these updates make your simulations more precise and much closer to real-world operations.