A Structured Techno-Economic and Environmental Assessment Framework for Green Interventions on Cargo Ships: Application to a Container Vessel
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Container vessels—characterized by high transport work and energy-demanding operating profiles—constitute one of the most emission-significant fleet segments and a strategically important area for implementing and assessing decarbonization initiatives. Responding to the persistent absence of integrated analytical approaches, this paper introduces a unified techno-economic and environmental assessment framework for evaluating green interventions on operating ships. The framework comprises a set of fuel-consumption, environmental performance, and techno-economic metrics and a transparent and globally applicable assessment procedure enabling the consistent comparison of heterogeneous intervention types towards sustainability. The framework is applied to a representative medium-size container vessel to demonstrate its analytical potential and practical relevance. The results of the specific application reveal the systematic trade-offs between environmental and economic performance of green interventions: operational optimization delivers the strongest carbon-intensity improvements and isolated technical retrofits provide favorable economic returns but limited environmental gains, while integrated technical–operational packages achieve the most balanced overall outcomes. Overall, the paper has both a methodological contribution by suggesting a coherent, regulation-aligned assessment structure, as well as a practical decision-support value for ship operators and policymakers.
Source: Eng—Advances in Engineering
Institutions: International Hellenic University, University of Patras
Language: English
Subfield: Environmental Engineering
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $1,448
OpenAlex ID: W7132848698
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