A Monte Carlo approach for the fully probabilistic evaluation of operability in ship dynamic positioning scenarios

The Dynamic Positioning system allows a vessel to keep a precise position and heading during stationing operations in a rough sea by using onboard actuators only. During the design phase, it is mandatory to identify the capability of the system actuators to counteract the environmental forces. Conventional predictions are limited to the estimation of a maximum sustainable wind speed on predefined encounter angles by estimating the corresponding wave parameters with questionable standard deterministic correlations. The proposed approach aims at determining the dynamic positioning performances by using site-specific long-term environmental conditions which are modelled with joint distributions of wind and wave parameters. To this end, the operability of the dynamic positioning system is evaluated as a non-deterministic multidimensional Monte Carlo integration process, based on the sampling of environmental joint distributions. For each environmental condition, a quasi-static dynamic positioning analysis is performed solving the equilibrium between external forces and the vessel’s actuators through a non-linear thrust allocation algorithm. The proposed methodology is applied to a reference offshore ship in five different operative geographic areas, highlighting the suitability of the calculation methodology for site-specific operability predictions.