The recent increase in crude oil trading has led to an increase in the workings of SPM for crude oil carriers. VLCCs generally encounter difficulty entering port due to limitations in terms of sea depth and maneuverability. The SPM is a system that allows mooring to the buoy located in the outer sea for such vessels. However, the buoy is more affected by relatively external forces because of their offshore location. Therefore, the safety assessment of SPM is particularly important as it can lead to large oil pollution disasters in the event of SPM accidents. Despite this, in the implementation of the Marine Traffic Safety Audit Scheme in Korea, there exists no guidance for SPM. In this study, a SPM mooring safety assessment is performed using OPTIMOOR, a numerical analysis program, so as to understand the mooring characteristics of SPM. As a result, it is confirmed that the tension of mooring lines and hull movement in the SPM are greatly affected by the encounter angles with external forces. In addition, it is found that the maximum tension of the mooring line is elevated as the water depth becomes shallower through sensitivity analysis. According to SPM characteristics, which has a large influence on the encounter angle, this study has proposed an amendment to setting criteria in the implementation of the Maritime Traffic Safety Audit Scheme which could improve the reliability and accuracy of mooring safety assessments.

Control allocation is an important part of a system. It implements the function that map the desired command forces from the controller into the commands of the different actuators. In this paper, the authors present an approach for solving constrained control allocation problem in vessel system by using multi-parametric quadratic programming (mp-QP) algorithm. The goal of mp-QP algorithm applied in this study is to compute a solution to minimize a quadratic performance index subject to linear equality and inequality constraints. The solution can be pre-computed off-line in the explicit form of a piecewise linear (PWL) function of the generalized forces and constrains. The efficiency of mp-QP approach is evaluated through a dynamic positioning simulation for a vessel by using four tugboats with constraints about limited pushing forces and found to work well.