Arctic sea route planning based on POLARIS rule

Abstract

In this study, a ship-route-planning method to find an economical and safe shipping route in the Arctic Sea is proposed. The indicators of the factors that affect the ship operation are defined in order to formulate a ship-route-planning problem into an optimization problem. Based on this, a new constraint for Arctic Sea is formulated, which implies the severity of sea ice to the ship, following the POLARIS (Polar Operational Limit Assessment Risk Indexing System) rule. To find the optimum route, the ship route and speed are optimized simultaneously using the seed-based genetic algorithm. To evaluate the applicability of the proposed method, the result was compared to the actual path and operation data of the ARAON, which is a research ship in the Arctic Sea. ？ 2019 by the International Society of Offshore and Polar Engineers (ISOPE).