System-level Simulation for Sustainable Winter Navigation

Journal article, 2025

Many European countries are connected to the Baltic Sea, making it vital for transporting goods and passengers in the region. Because of its northern location, a significant part of the Baltic Sea is ice-covered in winter, resulting in complications for ship navigation. Icebreakers may allow for safe and efficient transportation in ice conditions, which requires their organizing in a centralized system aimed at efficient and sustainable navigation. It is vital to analyze maritime traffic in ice to understand better the future need for icebreakers in the Baltic Sea. The paper applies agent-based simulation to enhance the performance of winter navigation and icebreaking assistance in the Bay of Bothnia. We developed novel algorithms upgrading our decision-support tool to model the dynamics of the icebreaker resource availability, optimize icebreaker allocation in the Bay of Bothnia, and study how changing the directed pathways affects the efficiency of the winter navigation system. We demonstrated the capabilities of the developed algorithms in the case studies.