A spatio-temporal route planning algorithm with stopovers for ship navigation in Arctic ice-covered regions

The strategic and economic significance of Arctic navigation is becoming increasingly prominent. However, the extreme ice-covered environment poses severe challenges to the safety of ship navigation. Existing automated route planning methods struggle to effectively adapt to dynamically changing ice conditions. Furthermore, simplifications in speed control mechanisms and ice resistance modeling further limit the applicability of algorithms in complex ice zones. To address these issues, we propose a spatio-temporal route planning with stopovers under ice constraints (STRPSI) algorithm. It introduces a spatio-temporal search mechanism and incorporates an adaptive stopover strategy, enabling dynamic speed reduction and self-adaptive selection of crossing timing based on pre-specified time-varying ice field information. Additionally, ice resistance is modeled based on different sea ice characteristics to optimize the ship transit model. The effectiveness of STRPSI is validated through applications in three obstacle avoidance scenarios and two large-scale ice field cases. Results demonstrate that STRPSI can effectively adjust navigation strategies within the tested scenarios, achieving safe transit through complex ice conditions by leveraging the stopover strategy. Moreover, the reachable space extracted provides a novel auxiliary perspective for route planning. The proposed method demonstrates potential for enhancing the adaptability and safety of polar navigation in complex ice conditions, providing a new technical pathway for intelligent navigation in ice-covered regions.