A Deep Learning Method for Short-Term Dynamic Positioning Load Forecasting in Maritime Microgrids

The dynamic positioning (DP) system is a progressive technology, which is used in marine vessels and maritime structures. To keep the ship position from displacement in operation mode, its thrusters are used automatically to control and stabilize the position and heading of vessels. Hence, the DP load forecasting is already an essential part of DP vessels, which the DP power demand from the power management system (PMS) for thrusting depends on weather conditions. Furthermore, the PMS is used to control power generation, and prevent power failure, limitation. To perform station keeping of vessels by DPS in environmental changes such as wind, waves, capacity, and reliability of the power generators. Hence, a lack of power may lead to lower DP performance, loss of power, and position, which is called shutdown. Therefore, precise DP power demand prediction for maintaining the vessel position can provide the PMS with sufficient information for better performance in a complex decision-making process for the DP vessel. In this paper, the concept of deep learning techniques is introduced into DPS for DP load forecasting. A Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm based on a nonlinear recurrent neural network is employed in this paper for predicting thrusters' power consumption in sea state variations due to challenges in power generation with the relative degree of accuracy by combining weather parameter dependencies as environmental disturbances. The proposed method evaluates with three traditional forecasting methods through a set of practical real-time DP load and weather parametric data. Numerical analysis has shown that with the proposed method, the future DP load behavior can be predicted more accurately than that obtained from the traditional methods, which greatly assists in operation and planning of power system to maintain system stability, security, reliability, and economics.