Management of environmental streaming data to optimize Arctic shipping routes

Dynamic accurate predictions of Arctic sea ice, ocean, atmosphere, and ecosystem are necessary for safe and efficient Arctic maritime transportation; however a related technical roadmap has not yet been established. In this paper, we propose a management system for trans-Arctic maritime transportation supported by near real-time streaming data from air-space-ground-sea integrated monitoring networks and high spatio-temporal sea ice modeling. As the core algorithm of integrated monitoring networks, a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network is embedded to improve Arctic sea ice mapping algorithms. Since the LSTM is localized in time and space, it can make full use of streaming data characteristics. The sea ice–related parameters from satellite remote sensing raw data are used as the input of the LSTM, while streaming data from shipborne radar networks and/or buoy measurements are used as training datasets to enhance the accuracy and resolution of environmental streaming data from outputs of LSTM. Due to large size of streaming data, the proposed management system of trans-Arctic shipping should be built on a cloud distribution platform using existing wireless communications networks among vessels and ports. Our management system will be used by the ongoing European Commission Horizon 2020 Programme “ePIcenter.”

Autonomous ships for container shipping in the Arctic routes

This study investigates the competitiveness of various autonomous ship categories for container shipping in the Arctic route. We propose a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) framework using four ship categories as alternatives and eight criteria for competitiveness evaluation. We analyse collected data using the Best–Worst Method (BWM), one of the recently developed MCDM methods. The findings reveal that operating expenses, navigation aspects, and environmental protection are the three most important criteria for deploying autonomous ships in the Arctic route. Among the three investigated autonomous ships alternatives, the semi-autonomous ship operated from a shore control centre (SCC) is prioritized for Arctic shipping in the foreseeable future, when benchmarked against the conventional ship. The SCC-controlled semi-autonomous ship alternative is competitive in the majority of the considered criteria including operating expenses, capital expenses, navigation, ship-shore and ship–ship communication, search and rescue, and environmental protection.