Towards an automatic ice navigation support system in the Arctic area

Conventional ice navigation through sea ice is manually operated by well-trained navigators, whose experiences are heavily relied upon to guarantee the ship's safety. Despite increasingly available ice data and information, little has been done to develop automatic ice navigation systems to better guide ships in sea ice. In this study firstly navigable sea areas for different types of ships were identified according to the navigation codes in northern regions. Secondly, three algorithms of path planning were adopted to automatically compute the safest-and-shortest ship routes based on the concepts of the Voronoi diagram, Visibility graph, and Visibility-Voronoi diagram, respectively. These algorithms and results were compared and evaluated in terms of different application scenarios. Results show that the Visibility-Voronoi approach seems to be the best viable solution in terms of computing performance and navigation safety. The work will provide a basis for further development towards an automatic ice navigation support system