Optimal control of offshore indoor climate

An optimal indoor climate control is very critical to manned offshore platforms in terms of onboard staffs' comfort, safety and the production efficiency as well. Due to the harsh weather condition and severe spatial limitations, offshore indoor climate control is much more challenging than any on-ground situations. This paper presents a preliminary investigation of optimal offshore indoor climate control for an oil-and-gas offshore platform by employing some advanced control technique - Model Predictive Control (MPC). The Single-Zone concept is adopted for modeling the offshore indoor climate, based on the thermal energy and mass balances. A constraint MPC solution is developed, and compared with a PID solution, which is derived from the existing control system. The simulation results show huge potential to significantly improve the performance of the existing system using optimal control techniques.