Complex marine operations require high real-time situational awareness and monitoring to carry out the mission in a safe and energy-efficient way, while at the same time maximising the weather window and minimising the waiting time to carry out the operation. Situational awareness and system monitoring will also be essential to make systems and operations more autonomous, which is a growing trend. Especially for complex offshore operations, there is often a requirement for an operational plan, also based on analyses, to be able to carry out an assignment. These analyses are performed prior to the operation, where both the weather data and other operational data have great uncertainty associated with them, which often leads to conservative results. By combining real-time data streams from sensors on board the vessel with weather data, both real-time and predicted, and advanced models and algorithms, it is possible to increase system understanding and provide decision support to the user prior to the operation. Decision support also allows for varying operational data in the analysis itself, such as how many tugger wires are needed in a crane lifting operation, and the recommended pre-tension of these. The combination of real-time data, algorithms and models also makes it possible to monitor unmeasured system conditions, if these are observable through the models, which can also be included in, or used directly as decision support during the operation. In addition, such a decision support system can be used to identify possible dangers in the near future by running so-called "what-if" analyses based on the current state and any changes expected in the near future. Experience data from such a system can also be used for planning new, similar operations.
SINTEF has expertise in decision support for marine operations, both from offshore operations and from fishery, and can be helpful with data capture, mathematical models, algorithms and analyses.