System Level Simulation of the Winter Navigation in the Baltic Sea

Efficient winter navigation has crucial importance for Finland as all Finnish harbors are icebound every winter. A winter navigation system level simulation tool has been developed to analyse the marine traffic in wintertime and to analyse the present and future need of icebreakers when both marine traffic patterns, ice-going ship characteristics and ice conditions will change. This paper summarises the basic principle of the tool and presents some recent applications together with the conducted verification and validation. The tool has been applied both in the northern part of the Baltic Sea and in the south to study the winter navigation system: on the Bay of Bothnia for Finnish marine traffic and the Gulf of Finland for Estonian marine traffic.