Conventional ice navigation on the sea is manually operated by well-trained navigators, whose experiences are heavily relied upon to guarantee the ship’s safety. However, due to more dramatically changing climate, the number of reported maritime accidents has been growing in recent years. Despite the increasingly available ice data and information, little has been done to develop automatic ice navigation support system to better guide ships on the sea.
In this study, firstly we identified navigable sea areas for different types of ships according to the navigation codes in northern regions. To qualify whether a sea ice area is navigable for a given type of ship, a quantitative measure, namely ice numeral (IN), is defined by Transport Canada (1996).
Secondly, we adopted two algorithms to automatically compute the safest-and-shortest ship routes based on the concepts of Voronoi diagram and Visibility graph.