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Offshore vessels are nowadays equipped with dynamic positioning systems, meaning they have additional thrusters dedicated to the station keeping of the unit. However, there is no rational criterion on the placement of these devices to increment station keeping capabilities. This is true both in case of a vessel retrofitting or for the design of a new unit. The present work proposes investigating a methodology for the optimal placement of thrusters along the hull of an offshore unit. This implies the adoption of a suitable optimisation algorithm capable of handling all the constraints of the optimisation problem. As the target is the optimal capability, the optimisation should handle multiple dynamic positioning capability calculations, meaning (in a quasi-static approach) that it is capable of solving multiple thrust allocation problems at each optimisation step. As thruster allocation is another optimisation problem, the process should handle two nested optimisations. Here, the global location problem is solved with a differential evolution algorithm, while the thrust allocation employs non-linear programming. As the capability calculations imply the adoption of a specific wind–wave correlation, the present work compares the effect of different correlations on the optimised location of the thrusters. The results presented on a reference Pipe Lay Crane Vessel highlight the differences in the final optimum as a function of the environmental modelling.
