Guest Column: Delivering to our Walk to Work promises

In this Guest Column, Stephen Bolton, Managing Director of Bibby Marine Services, shares his views with our readers.

As an industry driving improved efficiency and effectiveness, it is my firm belief that we as service providers have a responsibility to provide information not only on what the equipment does but in addition on how the service will perform for the individual client.

Expanding further; Taking the gangway
height this is rather simplistic, in that by providing basic information on the
target platform height above LAT and with some basic calculations around the
gangway height range and tidal range over the time period when we will be
working we can make useful calculations on whether we have restrictions at say
a high spring tide on a particular day. Discussing likely access success or
capability over a time period at a location is altogether more difficult.

Hence Bibby working with Damen designed the
Digital Twin simulator to initially support the Damen ASV9020 platform which
forms the basis of the Bibby WaveMaster 1 (operating speculatively in the
central North Sea) and her sister ship the Bibby WaveMaster Horizon (dedicated
to SGRE and ENBW on the German EEZ HoHe See Offshore Wind Farm).  

The Digital Twin brings together the vessel dynamic model with the actual DP and gangway controller. By adding the client supplied met / metocean data for their site, we can analyse the performance that can be expected based on the time of year. In simplistic terms this allows us to state the predicted access likely to be achieved over the charter period and allow a discussion around the execution of the works to take place with greater certainty. It also facilitates discussions around the impact of addition access points and how that could increase accessibility. In summary driving the efficiency of operational planning we seek.

Well recently we at Bibby thought the
answer was no. Despite being able to model and predict access we felt we needed
to publicly validate the results from the BWM1 and BWMH. That’s why recently we
commissioned BMO Offshore to review the data from the 2 years of almost
continuous operations of the BWM1 and the recent 1^st few months of
the BWMH.

In summary the analysis concluded with
great certainty that for individual locations, the Digital Twin data matched
the extrapolated data from our experience to date on BWM1 with the rather
limited data we have for BWMH (only operating for a few months). A great
success and information that will now be available to our clients as well as
the predicted information from the simulator to add to confidence levels.

However note the use of the word
“extrapolated” what we found was that over the 27months of operating BWM1, we
are rarely allowed to access above 2.5mHs, yet we can show that our safe limit
as defined by the simulator and taking account of the location and likely
weather is typically in excess of 3.0mHs.

So my challenge to the sector is as
follows, if we are bringing R&D focused designs to the market, supported by
Digital Twins and validated by real life data; should we not work to these new
limits? Is this not the next stage of being efficient and effective within the
bounds of QHSE?