Norway has been hunting minke whales in the North-Eastern Atlantic since the 1920-ies. Today the population counts about 100 000 animals. The Norwegian Computing Center has been involved in the work for improving the management procedures for more than twenty years.

During the 1990-ies, the main focus was on developing a methodology and a program system for abundance estimation for the minke whale stock based on surveys covering the northern North Sea, the Norwegian Sea, the Greenland Sea and the Barents Sea.  After the analysis was completed and the estimates were approved by the International Whaling Commision, the program system used in the analysis was ported to the Institute of Marine Research in Bergen, to be used in future abundance estimations.

An important task in more recent years has been to test out modifications of the present procedure for setting catch quotas. The whale population was simulated under various scenarios about the recruitment and other biological parameters. The quotas should not be higher than that the stock of whales is preserved even under rather pessimistic scenarios, for instance if the population size is considerable less than what we believe, or if is suddenly halved by sickness.