Switching control for thruster-assisted position mooring

The position mooring (PM) for marine vessels contains several controllers. such as heading, damping, restoring and mean force controllers which could be activated or deactivated depending on the environmental and operational conditions. This paper proposes to integrate these controllers into a switching control system. The supervisory control is adopted to facilitate the automatic switching. The supervisory switching control involves the designs of a set of models to track the existing operational condition and the switching logic. Simulations and experiments will be provided for validation. It is shown that the switching control could extend the weather window of the PM system. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.