The Dynamic Positioning Committee hosted the first webinar in a series on October 14, 2020 leading up to the October 2021 conference. We hope these webinars demonstrate that as DP technology continues to improve, the MTS DP Committee continues to support the DP Community with discussions of DP technology.
Presenter Information Sofien Kerkeni, has presented at five of the last six MTS DP conferences since 2014. His presentations generate much interest and exhibit originality and technical strength. Copies of these presentations are available fordownload here.
About Sofien
Sofien graduated from the high School of Engineering of Nantes in France with a specialization on Applied Mathematics and Control Systems. He has started his career by joining Sirehna as marine control engineer where he quickly became the principal DP engineer and a world-recognized specialist. He has designed and commissioned at sea Autopilots and DP systems for more than 70 ships including the world’s most accurate heavy lifting DP jackup and has written more than 15 papers focused on DP. Moreover he has significantly contributed to the research about DP in ice conditions. He is the founder and the CEO of the company D-ICE Engineering (Design Innovation Control Expertise). The company is providing high-level services and systems for the whole maritime and offshore industry and is the leader of the research in Dynamic Positioning in France. Rugbyman and trombonist, Sofien is also reviewer for different scientific journals and truly passionated by ambitious and challenging projects.
About D-ICE
D-ICE is a deeptech bringing innovative solutions the marine, offshore, naval, shipping and marine renewables industry. Specialized in Artificial Intelligence, Systems Engineering, Hydrodynamics, Control Theory and Robotics, the company develops cutting-edge numerical tools for the modeling, simulation and control of complex offshore structures and marine operations. D-ICE offers disruptive products and high-level of expertise for the Marine, Offshore and Renewables industries including Autonomous Vessels, Decision-Support Systems, Weather Routing or Floating Wind Turbines Control Systems.
DP Systems are rapidly increasing their importance with the acceleration of digitalization and the rise of autonomous systems. One of the major upcoming challenges consists of the need for significant improvements in terms of DP performances, global reliability and predictability as DP operations are conducted fully autonomously.
In conventional operations DP operators play a crucial role, e.g. by adapting the different settings, setpoints, depending on the ongoing situation, and monitoring the global system. For autonomous operation, which has no DP operator, there is thus a clear need to improve the knowledge of hydrodynamic behavior of offshore assets and to increase positioning performances along with sensors monitoring and thrust usage. The benefits of very recent control and optimization techniques are investigated in this paper and show significant improvements in the performances. Moreover, the general system and software architecture are also presented as it has been proven as one of the critical technological locks. This project and all the presented results are apart of the OCEANiCS initiative led by D-ICE Engineering.
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