Objectives This paper proposes a speed and power allocation strategy collaborative optimization method for hydrogen fuel cell ships based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) in order to solve the problem of the energy efficiency improvement of such ships being limited by their difficulty in reaching optimal speed under complex sailing environments.

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

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

Conclusions The proposed method can effectively improve the sailing energy efficiency of short-range ships and resolve the defect of the speed ladder allocation of traditional segmental optimization, providing useful references for the popularization and application of hydrogen fuel cell ships.