Scenario-based fault-tolerant model predictive control for diesel-electric marine power plant

Diesel-electric propulsion is often used for vessels with dynamic positioning systems. For such vessels any single point failure should not lead to loss of position. One failure case is that a generator set is suddenly disconnected. This loss of a power producer gives a drop of the power bus frequency. A blackout will occur if the frequency drops too much, it is therefore required to keep the frequency high enough to withstand such a failure. Load reduction is often used to avoid blackouts due to such faults. The power management system will detect that a fault has occurred, and will reduce the load of some consumers to reduce the overload and recover the plant. In this paper, a controller is suggested which explicitly handle the requirements for the failure scenarios. This method is a practical approach to handle the safety requirements, in addition to existing load reduction. The plant can run with fewer connected generator sets by better control of the safety requirements, which will reduce the fuel consumption.