A forecasting model with hybrid bidirectional long short-term memory for mooring line responses of semi-submersible offshore platforms

Abstract

Semi-submersible offshore platforms are often produced in the deep sea far away from land, which results in high operating costs and difficult safety maintenance due to the harsh and complex working conditions. Adopting a neural network model for online accurate prediction of mooring tension of semi-submersible offshore platforms can adjust the ballast according to the advance of mooring tension change to keep the platform in a relatively smooth movement amplitude and improve production efficiency. In addition, it can also prevent catastrophic accidents caused by anchor chain breakage due to excessive mooring tension. However, the measured mooring tension of semi-submersible offshore platforms is characterized by complex nonlinear non-stationarity, which leads to insufficient prediction accuracy of a single prediction model. This paper develops a novel online prediction model of mooring tension for semi-submersible offshore platforms based on empirical modal decomposition (EMD), convolutional neural network (CNN), and bidirectional long and short-term memory neural network (BiLSTM). The proposed model is validated using the measured data of the first semi-submersible offshore platform in the South China Sea during operation. The experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms other comparative models currently mainstream for mooring tension prediction. In addition, the proposed method can also be used to predict complex nonlinear data in the field of ship and ocean engineering.