Optimizing Fuel Consumption in Thrust Allocation for Marine Dynamic Positioning Systems

In offshore maritime operations, automated systems capable of maintaining the vessel's position and heading using its own propellers and thrusters to compensate exogenous disturbances, like wind, waves, and currents, are referred to as marine dynamic positioning (DP) systems. DP systems play a central role in several marine operations, such as drilling, pipe-laying, coring, and ocean observation. These operations are the primary cause of fuel consumption, having a strong impact on the overall footprint of the vessel. For this reason, we will face the problem of optimal thrust allocation of an over-actuated vessel to maintain position and heading with minimal fuel consumption. State-of-the-art approaches simplify this problem by roughly approximating it and obtain a simple, mostly convex, optimization problem that can be solved in near-real time by the automation system. In this article, we improve current approaches with the following contributions. We will exploit a higher fidelity representation of the physical system, and we will manipulate the resulting optimization problem accordingly, to allow for near-real-time solutions on conventional computing platforms on-board. We evaluate the quality of the proposal with a case study on a drilling unit equipped with six thrusters. The results will show that it is possible to achieve up to 5% of fuel savings with respect to conventional approaches. Note to Practitioners - This article was motivated by the problem of minimizing fuel consumption in thrust allocation of DP systems. The current approaches simplify this issue by adopting simpler, yet related, optimization problems as surrogates, keeping the problem tractable for near-real-time control. We propose, instead, to solve the original problem with state-of-the-art modelization of the physical system and exploit reasonable and theoretical proprietaries to achieve optimal solutions in near-real-time. The results on a drilling unit will show additional fuel savings of up to 5% with respect to alternative state-of-the-art approaches.