Application of Machine Learning Techniques As a Means of Mooring Integrity Monitoring

Abstract

There is growing importance in the offshore floating production sector to develop reliable and robust means of continuously monitoring the integrity of mooring systems for FPSOs and FPUs, particularly in light of the upcoming introduction of API-RP-2MIM. Here, the limitations of the current range of monitoring techniques are discussed, including well established technologies such as load cells, sonar, or visual inspection, within the context of the growing mainstream acceptance of data science and machine learning. Due to the large fleet of floating production platforms currently in service, there is a need for a readily deployable solution that can be retrofitted to existing platforms to passively monitor the performance of floating assets on their moorings, for which machine learning based systems have particular advantages. An earlier investigation conducted in 2016 on a shallow water, single point moored FPSO employed host facility data from in-service field measurements before and after a single mooring line failure event. This paper presents how the same machine learning techniques were applied to a deep water, semi taut, spread moored system where there was no host facility data available, therefore requiring a calibrated hydrodynamic numerical model to be used as the basis for the training data set. The machine learning techniques applied to both real and synthetically generated data were successful in replicating the response of the original system, even with the latter subjected to different variations of artificial noise. Furthermore, utilizing a probability-based approach, it was demonstrated that replicating the response of the underlying system was a powerful technique for predicting changes in the mooring system.