Aiming at the problem of high fuel consumption of the main engine of tugboats in port operations, from the perspective of Ship management energy saving, an optimization method of tugboats fuel-saving and speed based on the improved tugboat algorithm was proposed . By analyzing the energy transfer mechanism of the ship, engine and paddle, the optimization model of its main engine fuel consumption was established, and the optimization research on the speed of each section of the tugboat in a certain voyage was carried out. The beetle antennae search algorithm（BAS） is a new optimization algorithm in recent years, which has obvious advantages in the optimization of mathematical models with complex structures, but there are also some problems such as slow convergence and easy access to local optimal states. For this reason, an improved beetle antennae search algorithm（IBAS）was established to better to meet the application requirements. In this paper, through the calculation and analysis of an example, the proposed algorithm was used to optimize the fuel consumption of the main engine of the tugboat,the results show that the algorithm has fast convergence speed and high optimization efficiency. Compared with the beetle antennae search algorithm and the ant colony algorithm(ACO),the proposed optimization algorithm keeps a faster operation time and improves the accuracy of optimization results.