Design of mooring systems for offshore structures through an optimization approach

Resumo

The design of mooring systems for offshore structures is crucial for ensuring the safe and efficient operation of floating production systems (FPS) within the oil and gas industry. This activity is renowned for its demanding resource requirements, in terms of technical challenges, design criteria, computational cost and extensive hours of work from highly skilled professionals. In this context, structural optimization emerges as a potential solution to mitigate the use of some of these resources, introducing a design approach reliant on optimization algorithms capable of translating technical criteria into mathematical functions and proposing valid and optimized solutions. However, this optimization approach presents its own set of challenges, notably the need of evaluating thousands of structural models, which directly depend on time-consuming numerical simulations. This work aims to treat the optimization challenges by proposing strategies to expedite the computation of numerical models and to support the designing professional in determining optimized designs suitable for direct industrial application.