CEARCTIC – Joint Center of Excellence for Arctic Shipping and Operations (2013-2018)

The motivation for this project arises from the rapid developments of Arctic Oil and Gas explorations, where we have to ensure safe operations under extreme conditions in a sensitive environment. The current regulations for the design of ice-going ships fail to predict the actual safety level of a ship and the required safety level both for ships and installations is unknown. Consequently, ships transiting on ice-infested waters are not designed according to physical measures, i.e. accurate limit states under ice loading, but according to economic measures and empirical design measures.
Since empirical measures are not available and the tendency to minimize expenditure can lead to severe environmental catastrophes, risk-based design methodologies using first principal methods are required in order to ensure safe operations and transport of the natural resources within and out of the Arctic Sea.
The scope of this project is the holistic treatment and identification of the ship design relevant features to ensure safe arctic operations and transport. Holistic risk analysis includes typically: definition of hazard scenarios, their occurrence probability and consequences. For arctic operations, the definition of all these three elements is challenging. The ground breaking novelty in this holistic risk-based approach is its focus on the design relevant actions occurring during the entire lifecycle of the ship or installation in question, and not only on the initial service load conditions followed by a selection of required safety oriented assessments based on standard regulations.