A concept for onboard risk-based information system to ensure the safety of ship operation in ice conditions

Abstract

The vast majority of sea-going ships being designed and built for internal customers have an ice class and are intended for regular operation in the Arctic or freezing non-Arctic Seas. The ship navigation in ice must be safe and thus guarantee an economically feasible magnitude of negative risks with regard to the ship itself, the cargo under transportation, the human life, and the environment. The safety of ship navigation in ice depends primarily on its ice qualities. This article presents and studies two main approaches to ensuring the safety of ship operation in ice conditions that are assessment of safe modes of motion in ice based on requirements for both ice performance and ice strength and assessment of operational limits in polar waters based on risk indexing. Actual problems are revealed concerning development and application of documentation regulating the safety of ship operation in ice conditions, and priority ways for their solution are defined. Examples of onboard systems to monitor the ice loads and to measure the ice conditions are given, which constitute integral elements of a unified system to monitor the state of ship as a whole. The concept is proposed for onboard risk-based information system to ensure the safety of ship operation in ice conditions, including its general description, distinctive characteristics, functional capabilities, methodological principles, and block diagrams. The conclusion is drawn that practical implementation and introduction of proposed software-hardware solution will ultimately contribute to the further increase in the safety level for sea-going ships when navigating in ice, which provides for acceptable risks of key operational failures, including accounting for contemporary trends in the field of ice shipping.