Navigate#

Navigate is a sectoral integrated assessment model for the maritime industry’s transition toward zero-carbon shipping. It projects how a fleet renews itself, which fuels and technologies it adopts, where those fuels are produced and bunkered, and how regulation reshapes those choices — year by year, over multi-decade horizons.

Unlike a central-planner optimiser, Navigate represents long-term investment as a discrete-choice problem: shipowners weigh costs, regulation, and availability and pick among newbuild, retrofit, and fuel options through a multinomial logit model. Only short-term operational decisions, such as how a voyage is actually bunkered, are solved as a linear program. The result is a behavioural picture of the transition rather than a least-cost ideal.

A simulation is described in a small domain-specific language: human-readable .nav and .inc files that declare nodes — vessels, fleets, routes, ports, fuels, plants, regulations — and a timeline of events that change them. Running a deck produces Excel reports and plots that trace fleet composition, fuel demand, emissions, and compliance costs through time.

About this documentation#

This site is organised into two parts. New users should start with the tutorials and work through them in order; the reference manual is there to look up specifics as you build your own decks.

Tutorials

A guided path from installing Navigate and running your first single-vessel simulation through to modular, multi-scenario studies.

Tutorials

Reference Manual

The .nav/.inc DSL syntax and a complete description of every node type and its attributes, grouped by theme.

Reference Manual

Installation instructions and the full list of command-line options live in the project README.

Citing this Project#

If you use Navigate in your work, please cite us:

Lehn, F. W., Thomas, J. & Hintze, M. Navigate v1.0.0 (Fonden Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Center for Zero Carbon Shipping, 2026); https://github.com/zerocarbonshipping/navigate-zcs

BibTeX

@software{Navigate-2026,
    author = {Lehn, Frederik Winkel and Thomas, Julius and Hintze, Mathias},
    organization = {Fonden Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Center for Zero Carbon Shipping},
    license = {Apache-2.0},
    month = jul,
    title = {{Navigate}},
    url = {https://github.com/zerocarbonshipping/navigate-zcs},
    version = {1.0.0},
    year = {2026}
}

RIS

TY  - COMP
AU  - Lehn, Frederik Winkel
AU  - Thomas, Julius
AU  - Hintze, Mathias
TI  - Navigate
PB  - Fonden Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Center for Zero Carbon Shipping
PY  - 2026
ET  - 1.0.0
UR  - https://github.com/zerocarbonshipping/navigate-zcs
ER  -

APA

Lehn, F. W., Thomas, J., & Hintze, M. (2026). Navigate (Version 1.0.0) [Computer software]. Fonden Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Center for Zero Carbon Shipping. https://github.com/zerocarbonshipping/navigate-zcs

MLA

Lehn, Frederik Winkel, et al. Navigate. Version 1.0.0, Fonden Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Center for Zero Carbon Shipping, 2026, github.com/zerocarbonshipping/navigate-zcs.