In the autumn of 2015, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat (SPRS) performed a research cruise, named the "Oden Arctic Technology Research Cruise 2015" (OATRC2015) involving the two Swedish icebreakers Oden and Frej in the international waters north of Svalbard. The ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company supported and participated in OATRC2015. The overall objective of OATRC2015 was to perform a safe cruise collecting valuable and important scientific data and to conduct full-scale field trials for testing of key technologies. The scientific scope of OATRC2015 included three major fields of studies, namely: 1) collection of full-scale data necessary to build, calibrate and validate numerical models for floaters in ice, 2) collection of full-scale data necessary to build, calibrate and validate numerical models for Ice Management operations, and 3) collection of data for health, safety and environmental research. This paper presents OATRC2015, including the objectives of the expedition, and provides an overview of the performed research and the major findings. Several companion ATC 2016 papers are complementary to this paper.