The steady and reliable operation of a ship’s diesel engine is important to the ship’s electrical power system and the engine’s performance, and stable control of rotational speed is crucial to a diesel engine’s emission, economy and power performance. A ship’s diesel engine is a nonlinear and time-varying system. A traditional proportional–integral–derivative (PID) controller cannot regulate the speed under different working conditions. In this paper, a nonlinear mathematical model for speed regulation of diesel engines is established according to experiments and a multi-sliding surface variable structure controller for speed regulation of diesel engine is established by sliding mode control. A bulk cargo ship 500-I was analysed as an example. The MATLAB/Simulink simulation took the navigation environment and the effect of the ship propeller on the diesel engine into consideration. A simulation model considering the whole ship–engine–propeller system is built and some conclusions can be drawn from the simulation. The multi-sliding surface control can restrain the overshoot and realize a quick track of the targeted value with high accuracy and strong robustness. In addition, the fuel consumption and CO₂ emission of this sliding mode variable structure control is reduced by 4.6% compared with traditional PID control.