Comparative statistical analysis of simulated ice management effectiveness

Ice management is critical for safe and efficient operations in ice-covered waters; thus, it is important to understand the impact of the operator’s experience in effective ice management performance. This study evaluated the confidence intervals of the mean and probability distributions of two different sample groups, novice cadets and experienced seafarers, to evaluate if there was a difference in effective ice management depending on the operator’s level of experience. The ice management effectiveness, in this study, is represented by the “clearing-to-distance ratio” that is the ratio between the area of cleared ice (km2) and the distance travelled by an ice management vessel (km) to maintain that cleared area. The data analysed in this study was obtained from a recent study conducted by Memorial University’s “Safety at Sea” research group. With the distribution fitting analysis providing inconclusive results regarding the normality of the data, the confidence intervals of the dataset means were obtained using both parametric approaches, such as t-test, Cox’s method, and Johnson t-approach, and non-parametric methods, namely Jackknife and Bootstrap methods, to examine if the assumption of normality was valid. The comparison of the obtained confidence interval results demonstrates that the mean efficiency of the cadets is more consistent, while it is more varied among seafarers. The noticeable difference in ice management performance between the cadet and seafarer sample groups is revealed, thus, proving that crew experience positively influences ice management effectiveness.