Ice Management

The Ice Management (IM) operation is characterised by breaking the incoming ice features by several icebreakers, such that the downstream offshore structures are protected from dangerous ice features. IM is a comprehensive and interconnected system that involves ‘detection’, ‘tracking’, ‘forecasting’, ‘decision making’, and eventually ‘breaking’ the identified threatening ice features.

For SAMS, it is mainly the physical ice management (i.e., breaking the ice) that is of major concern. Most of previous work/simulations on the the ‘physical ice management’ procedure were only conducted in a rudimentary manner by empirical or simply kinematical models. Practical questions such as ‘how many icebreakers are needed?’; ‘how to deploy the available icebreaker fleet to defend an offshore structure?’ are often addressed with rather simplified models (e.g., the kinematical model). As opposed to this, SAMS offers a more physically based simulation model, involving explicitly modelling the fracture of particular sea ice features at operational scale. This shall yield a quantified evaluation of any icebreaker fleet deployment; thereby boosting the efficiency and ensuring the safety of the chosen Arctic Marine Operations, leading to the so-called ‘Green’ Arctic Marine Operations.

A demo of ice management simulation can be found here: