Cascade NMPC-PID control strategy of active heave compensation system for ship-mounted offshore crane

Abstract

In this paper, the problem associated with active heave motion compensation during heavy-lift operations performed by ship-mounted offshore cranes beneath rough marine environment is investigated. To effectively decouple the correlated motion of the suspended payload from the support vessel via the secondary regulated active heave compensation (SRAHC) system, a novel hierarchical control strategy is proposed by integrating a cascade control structure with an adaptive robust control scheme that incorporates a vertical motion forecast algorithm based on autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model, a conventional proportional-integral-derivative (PID) framework, and a nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) method. The introduction of the cascade structure is motivated by its prompt error response against control lag and efficient system order reduction for computational burden alleviation, which forms a crucial foundation for the NMPC-based real-time regulation of PID gains, ensuring optimal evolution of the SRAHC system while improving its practical feasibility. Furthermore, the enhancements in heave compensation and trajectory tracking performance, noise resistance, constraint satisfaction, and engineering application potential of the proposal are demonstrated through a thorough comparative analysis conducted in a practical co-simulation research system.