This book is an in-depth treatment of the dynamic positioning (DP) system of marine vessels. The book guides readers intuitively through the steps in development of a DP controller. It shows the reader how to aggregate and assimilate knowledge from many related fields from vessel dynamics, through environmental disturbance modeling, to control design. The book covers a wide range of DP controllers from the basic proportional-integral-differential system to the most advanced system that employs nonlinear model predictive control. Starting with the system description of a vessel and modeling relevant to control, the authors detail the physical model testing and field trials required for ship-model calibration. The book treats the interaction between environmental disturbance and vessel dynamics and pays detailed attention to filtering and estimation theories and their application to vessel-state estimation. This includes developments in the simultaneous estimation of states and unknown disturbances. The implementation of such state-of-the-art work is described using easy-to-follow flowcharts and pseudocodes. Simulation studies provide performance evaluation results and downloadable MATLAB(R) code is provided to enable easy replication of many of the examples. A literature review and coverage of developing areas such as ice DP round out a comprehensive review of modern DP research.
Dynamic Positioning Control will be of interest to graduate students, researchers, academics, and engineers in the field of ocean engineering.
