Overview

An essential part of the icebreaking service is the crew onboard both icebreakers and ice-going merchant vessels, who make the operations safe and fluent with the help of their know-how and experience. The competence of an icebreaker officer is a versatile combination of skilled handling and manoeuvring of the icebreaker. It is particularly important to be able to control and foresee various aspects influencing an assistance situation, where a merchant vessel is assisted by escorting or towing, in all ice and weather conditions. Hence, education, initial training, certification, and recurring training are crucial means for maintaining state of the art icebreaking services. These take place onboard, during icebreaking operations but can also be widely executed in simulator environment.

The objectives of work package 5 are to ensure safe and efficient icebreaking operations by:
– Developing a uniform training program to achieve the highest level of cooperation and interoperability between Sweden, Finland, and Estonia’s icebreaking resources and complementing gaps in pilot-like local knowledge.
– Developing simulator icebreaker models to be utilized for training purposes.
– Providing updated training facilities equipped with accurate simulators for the navigators of the icebreakers.

Task 5.1 – Development and validation of training content

This task aims to develop and validate appropriate training content for icebreaking services.
Key sets of skills for different icebreaking operations will be identified. Examples of those skills are handling and manoeuvring of own icebreaker, local knowledge of the fairways, ice conditions and sea-areas, escort operations, towing operations, IBNet usage, knowledge of the winter navigation system, including the Finnish Swedish Ice Class Rules, governmental instances for setting restrictions, etc.

The development of the training content will encompass different activities. Mapping of the current content of the training programs and above-mentioned special skills in the participating countries will be done. These will be compared against the existing and known future needs and requirements concerning icebreaking and winter navigation. The results of the mapping and comparison will be compiled in a report of special skills listed and comparison to existing training program content.

Based on the outcome of the mapping and comparison, a gap analysis will be performed to identify the gaps in the training programs and to define the further needs and requirements concerning the training and validation of competence of icebreaker officers as well as competence requirements introduced in the new Finnish pilotage legislation. Also, the possibilities for harmonizing parts of the training content among the participating countries will be explored. As a result of the above activities, new content of the training programs will be developed and validated against the previously identified and listed key skill sets.

Task 5.2 – Development of simulator ice breaking models to be utilized for training purposes

A prerequisite for good and efficient simulator training for the crew to learn to handle the icebreaker in ice and icebreaker operations, is a correctly behaving model, which is both mathematically and hydrodynamically accurate, so that the behaviour of the different icebreakers in different ice conditions, is modelled as realistically as possible.

This task covers the development of such special, high-quality mathematical models of the icebreakers and the ice field for simulators that will provide information of the ice conditions, sea state and weather considering the hull shape and propulsion system of the icebreakers as well as geographical area of operations.

Task 5.3 – Development of icebreaker simulator training facility

An icebreaker training simulator facility will be established in an existing simulator centre building of the Swedish Maritime Administration in Gothenburg. It will be used for initial and recurrent training, recruitment testing for the icebreaker personnel as well as for design of operational procedures and new services to streamline and make icebreaker operations more efficient. It will be a state-of-the-art training facility, offering possibilities and capacity for more realistic training of icebreaker crews. The facility will be a digital twin of the operational environment of an icebreaker.