Abstract: With the fast development of marine refrigerated transport business, the proportion of reefer container on container ships is increasing. In order to further improve the energy efficiency of container ships and reduce the full-voyage cost, an economic dispatching strategy for container ships considering reefer demand response is proposed. The operation characteristics of the reefer container is analyzed and its mathematical model is established. A full-voyage economic dispatching framework of ship microgrid including voyage optimization, day-ahead dispatching, and reefer container dispatching is established. Based on the voyage optimization, the variables that are continuous in time such as the state of energy storage equipment and vessel sailing distance are determined. The day-ahead dispatching determines the generators’ generation plan and the virtual electricity price, and cooperates with the reefer container dispatching to realize the economic operation of the microgrid. Taking the ship route from Hong Kong to Shanghai as an example, the proposed method can reduce the total voyage cost of container ships by 5.02% without increasing the investment cost, and realize the efficient operation of ship microgrid.

Key words: reefer container, demand response, ship microgrid, full-voyage optimization, economic dispatch