Objectives The energy efficiency improvement of fuel cell ships is limited due to the difficulty in obtaining optimal speed under complex sailing environment, the collaborative optimization method of speed and power allocation strategy for fuel cell ships based on particle swarm optimization is proposed.

Methods The spatial grid clustering analysis of meteorological environment data is carried out by K-means and is used as the basis for route segmentation. The speed-hydrogen consumption model of fuel cell ships is constructed by ship navigation resistance analysis and equivalent hydrogen consumption idea, and the optimization method of inheritance-link between voyage segments is designed by taking acceleration as the optimization parameter, and particle swarm optimization (PSO) is used to optimize ship speed and fuel cell output power.

Results The results show that the collaborative optimization method of speed and power allocation strategy reduces hydrogen consumption by 3.85% and 1.99%, respectively, compared with the original speed and the traditional speed segmentation optimization method.

Conclusions . This method can effectively improve the sailing energy efficiency of short-range ships, and the defect of the speed ladder allocation of traditional segmental optimization, which can provide a reference for the popularization and application of fuel cell ships