No abstract

This paper addresses fault-tolerant control for position mooring of a shuttle or floating production storage and offloading vessels. A complete framework for fault diagnosis is presented. A loss of a sub-sea mooring line buoyancy element and line breakage are given particular attention, since such failures might cause high-risk abortion of an oil-loading operation. With significant drift forces from waves, non-Gaussian elements dominate forces and the residuals designed for fault diagnosis. Hypothesis testing is designed using dedicated change detection for the type of distribution encountered. A new position recovery algorithm is proposed as a means of fault accommodation in order to keep the mooring system in a safe state, despite faults. The position control is shown to be capable of accommodating serious failures and preventing breakage of a mooring line, or a loss of a buoyancy element, from causing subsequent failures. Properties of the detection and fault-tolerant control algorithms are demonstrated by high fidelity simulations.

Early diagnosis and fault-tolerant control are essential for safe operation of floating platforms where mooring systems maintain vessel position and must withstand environmental loads. This paper considers two critical faults, line breakage and loss of a buoyancy element and employs vector statistical change detection for timely diagnosis of faults. Diagnosis design is scrutinized and a procedure is proposed based on specified false alarm probability and estimation of the distribution of the test statistics on which change detection is based. A structural reliability index is applied for monitoring the safety level of each mooring line and, a set-point chasing algorithm accommodates the effects of line failure, as an integral part of the reliabilitybased set-point chasing control algorithm. The feasibility of the diagnosis and of the fault-tolerant control strategy is verified in model basin tests.

No abstract