An Intelligent Winch Prototyping Tool

Abstract

In this paper we present a recently developed intelligent winch prototyping tool for optimising the design of maritime winches, continuing our recent line of work using artificial intelligence for intelligent computer-automated design of offshore cranes. The tool consists of three main components: (i) a winch calculator for determining key performance indicators for a given winch design; (ii) a genetic algorithm that interrogates the winch calculator to optimise a chosen set of design parameters; and (iii) a web graphical user interface connected with (i) and (ii) such that winch designers can use it to manually design new winches or optimise the design by the click of a button. We demonstrate the feasibility of our work by a case study in which we improve the torque profiles of a default winch design by means of optimisation. Extending our generic and modular software framework for intelligent product optimisation, the winch calculator can easily be interfaced to external product optimisation clients by means of the HTTP and WebSocket protocols and a standardised JSON data format. In an accompanying paper submitted concurrently to this conference, we present one such client developed in Matlab that incorporates a variety of intelligent algorithms for the optimisation of maritime winch design.

Evolutionary Winch Design Using An Online Winch Prototyping Tool

“…An example is depicted in Figure 1, which shows the Seaonics SCM-LARS, a new super compact launch and recovery system (LARS) that comes with a 3000 m umbilical on an electric winch with permanent magnet (PM) motors. As in our accompanying paper (Bye et al, 2017), we focus here on four important winch design components, namely the drum, electric motors, hydraulic motors, and the wire. Choosing appropriate values for design parameters related to these four components is necessary to yield winch designs that comply with desired design requirements and performance measures, or key performance indicators (KPIs).…”

“…Typically, because many of these parameters are dependent on each other, human winch designers will have to iteratively try a large set of combinations of parameter settings to arrive at a satisfactory design (Pearlman et al, 2017). For more details about the design process of winches and the motivation for our work, please see Bye et al (2017).…”

“…In this paper, we employ evolutionary algorithms in an attempt to automate this design optimisation process. We extend the case study we present in Bye et al (2017) and are mainly concerned with torque performance as a KPI. Notably, however, many other concerns should be taken into account by the winch designer, such as manufacturing and operating costs, equipment weight, and adhering to laws, regulations, design codes, and standards.…”

“…In Bye et al (2017), we present an overview of the clientserver software architecture of our product optimisation system, reproduced in Figure 2 for convenience. The main component of the server is a product calculator, for example for offshore cranes or winches, that typically contains a large number of different and interdependent product design parameters with complex and nonlinear interactions.…”

“…In these projects, we have developed a generic and modular software framework for intelligent computer-automated design (CAutoD) of maritime cranes and winches (Bye et al, 2016) and examined how various intelligent evolutionary algorithms can be applied to optimise the design (Hameed, Bye, Osen, Pedersen and Schaathun, 2016;Hameed, Bye and Osen, 2016a,b). Here, we have implemented a Matlab winch optimisation client (MWOC) that connects with an online winch prototyping tool (WPT) that we present in an accompanying paper submitted concurrently to this conference (Bye et al, 2017).…”