Time-varying structural parameter identification for the offshore gangway

The offshore gangway is a new type of offshore transfer equipment, equivalent to an offshore passage. This device makes it convenient for people to transfer between a vessel and an offshore structure. The control algorithm of the gangway system demands adjusting its control parameters to deal with harsh sea conditions and ensure personnel safety. Thence, it is essential to foreknow its time-varying structural parameters, such as the moment of inertia, the mass, the location of the mass center, and so on. However, due to the highly complex structure, these parameters are difficult to obtain through measurement directly. To adaptively identify these time-varying parameters for better controller design, this paper proposes a novel structural parameter identification approach based on the idea of interval division. During the identification process, the entire period is uniformly divided into several intervals. The time-varying model of the offshore gangway system can be represented in each interval by a quadratic regression equation, the coefficients of which can be derived by the least-squares algorithm. Furthermore, to adapt to the different variation frequencies and amplitudes of the parameters, the divided intervals are of distinct sizes according to the characteristics of each identification parameter. In addition, the particle swarm algorithm is employed to obtain the optimal interval sizes, the cost function of which consists of a series of output error terms. Verified by simulation, the method presented in this paper can effectively estimate the structural parameters of the offshore gangway with high accuracy, with mean square errors reduced by at least 2/3 compared to other methods proposed in previous research.