SWOPP3 Gothenburg: Weather Routing Benchmark and BERS

Hello dear readers,

This week I traveled to Gothenburg, Sweden, to join SWOPP3 at RISE/SSPA, held in connection with Innovsail.

SWOPP3 is a joint industry workshop focused on weather routing and speed planning for wind-powered and wind-assisted ships. It brings researchers and companies to the same table, using shared inputs to compare methods in a rigorous way.

I contributed in two ways:

1. I launched the open SWOPP3 Phase 2 benchmark on CodaBench. In this first edition, we had 8 participants and a broad mix of methods, including graph search, dynamic programming, evolutionary methods, and variational approaches.
2. I presented BERS, our new continuous weather-routing method for just-in-time arrival, now available as a preprint.

The community response was excellent. People were welcoming, the discussion was technical and constructive, and there was clear support for continuing this benchmark line into SWOPP4.

For me, this is the kind of work I enjoy most: building reproducible benchmarks, developing practical algorithms under real constraints, and communicating results clearly to technical and business audiences.

I am proud to contribute to this line of work from IE University, where research quality and practical impact go hand in hand.

All the best,

Daniel Precioso