Abstract: In order to meet the practical needs of safe navigation of ships in ice area,a path planning model based on improved GWO（Gray Wolf Algorithm） is proposed.The traditional GWO is characterized by strong path search capability and high real-time performance in ship path planning in ice area,but it still suffers from the defects of long search path and slow convergence speed.By introducing Tent chaotic mapping to optimize the initial value of wolf packs,the diversity of wolf packs is enhanced to improve the global search capability;Levy flight and random wandering strategies are used to enhance the global and local optimization search capability,respectively;and a greedy mechanism is added to retain the path solution with better adaptation.Based on the POLARIS（Polar Operational Limit Assessment Risk Indexing System） to generate I_RO（Risk Index Outcome）,a raster map of the ice area is constructed,and simulation tests are carried out after integrating the ice data such as sea ice density and sea ice thickness.The experimental results show that the proposed improved model has the optimal performance,and compared with the traditional three typical algorithms,the maximum values of the improvement in the planning path length,running time and degree of smoothing are 6.5%,82.5% and62.5%,respectively,which can better satisfy the needs of the ships path planning in the complex navigational environment in the ice area.