Safety in ice-covered polar waters can be optimised via the choice of a ship's route. This is of utmost importance for conventional as well as autonomous ships. However, the current state of the art in e-Navigation tools has left two open questions. First, what essential information are these tools still missing, and second, how they are seen by sea captains. In order to address these questions, we organised an ice navigation workshop to systematically collect routing justifications given by and waypoints planned by experienced sea captains that are particularly seasoned in ice navigation. Here, we report the outcome of that workshop. Our key findings include the reasoning and the commentary of the participants in looking for a better and safer route. These comments shed light upon both the official and unofficial code of conduct in open waters and boil down into a list of additional prerequisite information if further steps towards system autonomy are sought. Finally, the expert-planned waypoints are to be published alongside this paper to act as a benchmark for future maritime studies.

A safety management system (SMS) is the common means used by organizations to assess organizational performance with respect to the safety and wellbeing of people, property and the natural ecosystem. A SMS provides confidence to diverse stakeholders that organizational safety is at an appropriate level and fulfils the applicable regulatory standards. As a multifaceted system for organizational safety assessment, ensurance and assurance, the evaluation of the design and operational use of SMS is a complex process. An evaluation needs to provide evidence about how well the design and operation of an SMS complies with applicable standards and how well the methods used in the SMS implementation support the organizational policies and practical work. In the maritime domain, SMS is broadly applied. However, there are few theoretically rooted SMS design approaches, and there is a lack of frameworks to evaluate how well the SMS is designed and how effectively it operates. This paper proposes an initial evaluation framework for the design and operational use of a maritime SMS design approach based on Systems-Theoretic Accident Model and Processes (STAMP), realist evaluation and Bayesian Networks. This framework is applied for a case study of vessel traffic services (VTS) Finland to test its relevance and ability to guide the SMS design. The experiences gained in the case study, and the related discussion on the framework, can guide further research in this area. Ultimately, the work can be used as a basis for developing maritime SMS auditing processes, based on specific theoretical and methodological approaches.

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