Detection of Mooring Line Failure of a Spread-Moored FPSO: Part 1 — Development of an Artificial Neural Network Based Model

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has gained popularity in recent years for offshore engineering applications, and one such challenging application is detection of mooring line failure of a floating offshore platform. For most types of floating offshore platforms, accurately detecting any mooring line damage and/or failures is of great interest to their operators. This paper demonstrates the use of an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model for detecting mooring line failure for a spread-moored FPSO. The ANN model representation, in terms of its input variables, is based on assessing when changes in a platform’s motion characteristics are in-fact indicators of a mooring line failure. The output of the ANN model indicates the status condition for the mooring lines (intact or failed). This ANN model only requires GPS / DGPS monitoring data and does not require data on the environmental conditions at the platform. Since the mass of an FPSO changes with the stored volume of oil, the vessel’s mass is also an input variable. The ANN training uses the results from numerical simulations of a spread-moored FPSO with fourteen mooring lines. The numerical simulations create the FPSO’s response to a range of metocean conditions for 360-degree directions, and they cover several levels of vessel draft (mass). Furthermore, the simulations cover both the intact mooring configuration and the full permutation where each of the fourteen mooring lines is modeled as broken at the top. The global performance analysis of the FPSO is presented in a different paper (Part 2 of these paper series). The training of the ANN model employs a back-propagation learning algorithm and an automatic method for determining the size of ANN hidden layers. The trained ANN model can detect mooring line failure, even for vessel draft (mass), sea states and environmental directions that are not included in the training data. This demonstrates that the ANN model can recognize and classify patterns associated with mooring line failure and separate such patterns from those associated with intact mooring lines under conditions not included in the original training data. This study reveals a great potential for using an ANN model to monitor the station keeping integrity of a floating offshore platform with changing storage, or mass status, and to detect mooring line failure using only the vessel’s mass and deviations in the platform’s motions derived from GPS / DGPS data.