Climate changes and recent discoveries of hydrocarbon resources in the High North have strongly influenced research and development activities in arctic marine and offshore industries, resulting in new design approaches, methods and tools. These are, however, usually not readily available and rarely appear as a full ship design package, which lead to the objective of this study: The development of a design and optimization platform for ships in arctic conditions. This software framework will incorporate most of the significant aspects relevant to the design of arctic ships. These aspects are the topics of a series of research projects by the Sustainable Arctic Sea Transport (SAST) research group at NTNU's Marine Technology Department. The design process within the framework commences with a module for the mission definition and the ship's operational profile. Based on these requirements the corresponding route-specific ice conditions are obtained from an integrated database. The mission specifications and expected ice condition scenarios provide the constraints for the optimization procedure. The analysis of the ice-ship interaction takes place in the framework modules being currently developed within the SAST group. These methods cover the area of ice-breaking pattern and local ice loads, ice resistance prediction, estimation of sliding resistance, machinery response and propulsion evaluation, structural response to service and accidental ice loads, followed by an assessment of the accidental consequences. The final step in the optimization routine is a compliance module that assesses whether the design goals are met or if further optimization iterations are required. The modules listed above, their interdependencies and the design and optimization process will be systematically described in the paper. The main feature of the software framework will be the optimization of a ship under the specified constraints and operational conditions. In addition, the platform will offer numerous further applications, e.g. detailed performance assessment of new or existing designs, simulation-based design selection, selection of ice class, hull form, machinery elements, etc. Furthermore, the framework will allow the use of each module individually and is intended to provide a knowledge base of the SAST research results. In its full development stage, the platform will allow the visualization of the ship-ice interaction modules and, once completed, will be publicly available.
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