A mooring system is a safety-critical part of any offshore facility, but – being underwater – is also one of the most difficult parts of the facility for operators to monitor.

Despite this difficulty, as part of their duty of care all operators need to demonstrate proactive monitoring of mooring integrity and keep evidence of these activities. Simple vessel excursion monitoring by itself does not capture the most prevalent mooring failure modes and sensors within the load path can be both complex to install and maintain, and can be subject to anomalous data over time.

Throw into the mix the various ways that mooring lines can fail and you end up with a complex and critical problem on your hands.

So how can we improve regulatory compliance while increasing assessment accuracy and reducing effort?

Fortunately, AMOG’s Smart Mooring Integrity Checker (SMIC) can be the eyes on your mooring system. Already commercially deployed with two major operators, SMIC provides automated 24/7 oversight of your floating asset and, using DPGS data alone, can alert you when a failure condition may have occurred. 

All of SMIC’s analyses of mooring health are then conveniently summarised in periodic Health Reports received straight to your inbox. These reports are designed to be your valuable resource for proof of integrity when undergoing regular mooring assessments – whether internal or with regulatory authorities.

SMIC’s Health Reports are fully customisable in terms of:

• Frequency: choose from any combination of weekly, monthly, yearly or custom periods
• Summaries: nominate which kind of statistical summaries to display
• Plots: designate the data types you would like plotted, the periods to compare against, and the plotting types to include – scatter, time history, etc
• Logs: opt to list out the notifications received
• Design: specify the design of the report to include company logos or follow document templates.
• File type: select from HTML, PDF, or a different format

With additional data sources, SMIC can also employ machine learning predictions, enhancing the system’s understanding of what the asset’s intact mooring behaviour should look like in all environmental conditions, resulting in even more accurate diagnoses of anomalous responses. This combination of multiple data streams into one smart model helps to compensate for imperfections in real-world sensor data and improves prediction robustness. All of this is done automatically – significantly reducing the effort in analysing large volumes of data.

How does SMIC compare to other methods of mooring integrity monitoring?

SMIC stands out amongst other mooring integrity monitoring techniques due to its flexibility in the variety of data streams it can use to predict integrity, and its ability to detect failures without costly instrumentation in the load line. The SMIC system addresses the deficiencies of simple Watch Circle excursion analysis by picking up subtle changes in vessel response regardless of the environmental conditions in which the failure happened.

Flexibility, ease of use, interpretability, and simple integration with existing infrastructure were all core principles at the heart of SMIC’s development. The web interface ensures anytime, anywhere data interrogation and SMIC’s analysis is customised and tailored to every client’s needs and to each asset’s specific mooring conditions.

The value brought by SMIC is multi-faceted. SMIC sheds light on leg failures that would otherwise go undetected, ensuring the lag time between mooring line failure and response is as short as possible. Organisational risk management and visibility of the importance of mooring integrity is improved and manual analysis effort can be slashed significantly. This means that more accurate analytics are paired with better regulation compliance, all for less effort.

A field-validated technology, backed by 30 years of AMOG’s marine engineering expertise and with several years of combined operation already, SMIC has proven to be the smarter way to do mooring integrity monitoring.

For more information on SMIC, please contact AMOG on +61 3 9542 3700 or click here.