Bruno da Fonseca Monteiro

Mooring Optimization of Offshore Floating Systems Using an Improved Particle Swarm Optimization Method

The offshore oil production industry is currently expanding its activities in even deeper waters, using moored floating platforms submitted to extreme environmental conditions. Therefore, the design of mooring systems to keep the position of such platforms is of vital importance to assure safety and economical feasibility for offshore oil production.In this context, this work presents optimization procedures to find the minimum offsets for floating platforms under environmental loads, taking radius, azimuth, pre-tension and material of the mooring lines as design variables.Considering that such optimization procedures require high computational costs, due to the need of nonlinear static and dynamic analyses with Finite Element models for each candidate solution, among the various meta-heuristic algorithms the Particle Swarm Optimization method (PSO) was chosen due to its simplicity, efficiency and parallel capability.Results of typical systems are presented, which indicate that the method is effective.Copyright