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.