Optimal Thrust Allocation for Dynamic Positioning of Deep-sea Working Vessel

Abstract

In this study, a thruster allocation method of a deep-sea working vessel was proposed with the aims of producing the demanded generalized forces and moment for dynamic positioning while at the same time minimizing total power. For this, an optimization problem for thrust allocation was mathematically formulated with design variables, objective function, and constraints. The genetic algorithms (GA) was used to solve the formulated problem. The proposed method was applied to an example of finding optimal thrust allocation of the deep-sea working vessel having 5 thrusters. The result showed that the method could be used to determine better strategy for thruster allocation of the vessel as compared to existing study.