Systematic reliability analysis of the Dynamic Positioning (DP) control system for a deepwater drilling rig

ABSTRACT

The system-level reliability analysis of DPS-3 Dynamic Positioning (DP) control system is proposed, which include both a qualitative failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) and a quantitative analysis. The FMEA results show that the single point failure of main components of DP control system will not have any global effect on automatic positioning, however, the components involved with high Risk Priority Number (RPNs) are advised to include in the quantitative analysis. Markov model method is used to quantitatively analyze the reliability of DPS-3 control system. To simplify the process of state transition, paralleled Markov models are built to model the main and back-up control systems respectively, the reliability of the whole DP control system would be obtained with the failure rates of main and back-up subsystems. The results show that the proposed method can treat the complex architecture of the control system in an efficient manner.

KEYWORDS:

• Dynamic Positioning (DP)
• reliability analysis
• FMEA
• Markov model
• DPS-3

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported partly by the Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation (LY18E090005, LGF19E090013), partly by China Scholarship Council (No. 201908330069), partly by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2018M632468), partly by Research Fund from Science and Technology on Underwater Vehicle Technology (SXJQR2017KFJJ05), partly by Zhejiang Provincial Top Key Discipline of Mechanical Engineering.