Enhancing the sustainability of the Finnish-Swedish Winter Navigation System by intelligent icebreaking assistance

Shipping in cold regions is complicated by ice, causing less energy- and cost-efficient transportation compared to open water. Climate change makes decarbonizing shipping in ice relevant for two reasons. First, breaking the ice requires much energy and generates significant emissions because ships are still mainly powered by fossil fuels. Second, the prospect of melting ice attracts more ships to cold regions, making shipping in ice more intensive. Ice-related challenges can be managed by providing efficient icebreaking assistance to improve the performance of the merchant ship traffic in ice. Some researchers proposed decision-support tools to optimize the cost- and time-related indicators of ice-infested maritime navigation in the Gulf of Bothnia2,3,4 and the Arctic,5. It is noted that the existing research on centralized icebreaking assistance modelling and optimization mainly studies the economic and social components of sustainability, leaving the environmental component out of consideration. The present study presents a new simulation-based framework to minimize greenhouse gas emissions of the Finnish-Swedish Winter Navigation System (FSWNS), consisting of merchant vessels and icebreakers operating in the Gulf of Bothnia.