MOSCOW, April 6. /TASS/. Russia's state-run Rosatom Corporation works on a digital platform for the Northern Sea Route (NSR), which will favor its safety and effectiveness in complicated Arctic conditions, Rosatom's Director of NSR Office Maxim Kulinko told TASS.
The Russian government has authorized Rosatom to work on navigation safety and to build up traffic along the Northern Sea Route. A unified digital ecosystem, which is planned to be commissioned by mid-2023, will be working at full capacity by June, 2025. The system's design expenses are estimated at 5 billion rubles ($62 million).
"As we see it, when the NSR unified digital platform is made and commissioned, when all the data accumulated in the marine operations headquarters is processed by the system, we will have bigger opportunities to forecast the ice situations and, respectively, all the economic consequences," the corporation's representative said. "We have been demonstrating that we are developing the NSR navigation, the route is getting safer and safer, we are increasing the icebreaker fleet, and thus the economic effect will be growing accordingly."
Players on the NSR logistics market have expressed interest in the unified digital platform, he continued. The system will comprise nine services that provide data on weather and ice conditions, on location of ships and icebreakers, monitoring, dispatching, fleet management, on how busy ports are, and will also offer instruments to process permissions for ships to pass NSR. The new software will not require additional equipment.
The platform's separate blocks are related to the development of cargo traffic along NSR and to management of its infrastructures. One of them would be a "transportation exchange" for shippers and ship owners, where they will receive information about routes from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok, schedules and loading of various vessels. Another block is a situation center synchronized with the Russian government's situation center.
"This part of the system is designed for federal agencies, as a kind of a situational dashboard, where we will understand the traffic, will see which cargo items are being shipped, which vessels are on the route, the amount of issued permits, and so on," he said. "We would like to have this platform, which is used by both by federal agencies and businesses, work in the "one-stop" manner to offer services that are extremely important, especially in modern conditions."
Expanding data sources
Rosatom's representative stressed the importance of additional data sources for year-round navigation along the Northern Sea Route, specifically in its eastern direction. Rosatom has been working on them, he said. "First of all, these are on-board measuring complexes to be installed on ships so that at each point they will automatically measure the ice thickness and compression, even the thickness of snow over ice. That would be data from different locations on the Northern Sea Route - what ice is coming, its compression, and so on. The system will process the data to produce fairly representative information," he added.
The state-run corporation has been building up ground infrastructures to receive foreign satellites, in particular Chinese ones, and aviation complexes for tactical ice reconnaissance. "They will be at a distance of up to 200 km from the ship - they will take off to give a radar image. Thus, users will have ice and a number of other parameters near the vessel's location, an ice map at a distance of 200 km to assess the ice conditions. The digital services system's aim is to ensure a vessel could receive from "one-stop" the entire set of recommendations for passing NSR," he said.
Maxim Kulinko stressed the platform's importance, recalling the emergency situation in 2020, where 24 vessels in NSR's eastern part froze up as they had set sailing rather late: the traffic stopped, and the emergency use of a few icebreakers led to significant economic losses. "The vessels could have passed fast enough if they could understand the situation, or, on the contrary, they would have been stopped at the entrance to be redirected to other routes. However, back then they froze into the ice and just had to wait to be pulled away from there," he said.
In 2018, the Rosatom State Corporation was assigned as the Northern Sea Route's infrastructure operator. It is responsible for the organization of shipping, construction of infrastructure facilities, navigation and hydrographic support and navigation safety systems in the severe Arctic conditions. The corporation supervises two federal projects "Development of the Northern Sea Route" and "Northern Sea Route - 2030", participates in the implementation of the plan for development of the Northern Sea Route to 2035, as well as in the Russian Federation's initiative for socio-economic development to 2030 "Year-Round Northern Sea Route." Atomflot, the Hydrographic Enterprise and Glavsevmorput are parts of the Rosatom State Corporation.