Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. (MHI) and NEC Corporation are to collaborate in the development of an "Energy Demand Forecast System for Ships" applying NEC's big data analysis technologies to achieve ship navigation energy savings. Plans call for MHI to begin marketing the system by the end of the 2014 fiscal year ending March 2015. The new system will project future energy demand based on previously collected data relating to ships' energy consumption, weather patterns, ambient air temperature, time of day, etc. Its forecasting technology will use NEC's heterogeneous mixture learning technologies, i.e. technologies that automatically detect massive patterns hidden in big data, discover useful patterns, and automatically switch reference rules according to the analyzed data.