2024 MTS DP Conference - Personal View Pt.1

Introduction:? The big DP conference has come and gone, so it’s all over but the crying.? Speaking of crying, here’s what I saw and thought.? Monday was the workshop on human factors and single fault tolerance.? Tuesday and Wednesday were the presentations of the conference.? This only covers Monday and Tuesday.? To save space, proper names and titles are available here.? I’m not MTS leadership and these are my personal views.

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Monday Workshop

Alarm Follow-Up:? Last year’s workshop had a session on a joint task force on alarm management, and we got an update this year.? The alarm management philosophy was agreed with 6 major vendors and 2 others opted out.? Implementation is pending and challenging due to costs, and the need to match customer equipment and operations (bad alarms are easy and generic, prioritized useful alarms require understanding context).? E.g. one vendor’s engineers figured out how to make their alarm system more useful, but couldn’t get the budget approved.? Regardless, Brazilian regulators require alarm systems improved, so that will probably lead to a useful roll out for the rest of us.? Lots of people had alarm horror stories and frustration.

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SPF Follow-Up:? Last year’s workshop’s other session was on a joint task force on single fault tolerance.? The official report out was positive, but the consensus was that it was undercooked, so it was back this year.? I’m concerned about all the complication just to get people to use FMEAs right by creating more hoops, but I liked Steve’s summary that it was a “guide on how to use the guidance” and it’s an encouraging sign of cooperation between disparate groups.? It might be a return to first principles through increased paperwork, but there is no question that there are problems with cheap bad FMEAs.? It emphasizes weak areas like design concept, hidden system functionality, integration, and cross connections through additional FMEA related reports (5 instead of 1).? It looks like we are drifting towards the aircraft model that was rejected in HSE RR195, because we lack the industrial base to support it (orphans rather than thousands of identical clones). ?This is what happens when powerful people are tired of being burnt.? That may be so, but they are pushing back against a powerful economic wind.? Who will make the sometimes too powerful shipyards and vendors take on this extra work, expense, time, and project risk?? Some shipyards and vendors can dictate to customers and class.? MTS will consider adding teeth with model bid and build specifications.? It’s aimed at new builds, and not at the moving target of operational discoveries, upgrades, and software updates.? It doesn’t include vital major tools like IMCA M259.? Major components are still in the works, so it isn’t coming out this year.

?Human Performance:? Despite MTS being the only DP operations guidance to recognize the continued importance of DPO and DPE corrective action, and some good presentations on training over the years, MTS has mostly focused on technical design problems.? Some think that is where most problems lie, but I’m pretty sure that things have swung and human factors are a large and increasing part of DP incidents.? Brazil and Petrobras is sure of it and require solutions.? Keelson proved problems a couple years ago, and NI now requires CPD.? Last year, Petrobras shared their excellent DP Golden Rules.? This year, Ari and Bolshoy presented pillars of human performance, their 4C model, and some potential tools.? The five pillars were a good start:

• Error is normal
• Blame fixes nothing
• Context drives behavior
• Learning is vital
• How you respond matters

The 4Cs were clarity, consistency, collaboration, and community (and, secretly, comprehensiveness and communication) and felt like they needed better fleshed out or explained.? One fellow suggested it might be more appropriate to have 7Cs, and we came up with more than 18 Cs before we were stopped.? The tools consisted of a contentless knowledge tracker, auto ASOG, auto FMEA, etc.? To me, they looked like adaptions of design and operations tools that did not cover much of human performance.? It was agreed that human performance management needed improved, but the 4Cs and tools were found insufficient.? It was suggested to adapt elements of excellent programs from other industries, such as aviation evidence based training, using what we have better, such as trials as training and regular emergency drills (how good are you on the IJS?), and emphasizing vital human elements, such as leadership and culture.? The wheel failed to be reinvented.

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Tuesday Conference Day 1

Keynote:? The conference began with a speech from Sydney Dekker, expert on human performance, which I had been looking forward too.? The choice of speaker was a good sign.? Unfortunately, he was unable to attend, so we got a video recording.? It was still good.? In the interests of fairness, someone near me thought it was a “very long diatribe” complicating Input à Processing à Output, and I heard a couple of others had said similar things, so my pending praise wasn’t universal, but a lot of people thought it good.? The talk was about fake safety vs. real safety and how safety comes from the people that do the work and their knowledge.? He had three main points:

• Understand Human Error – Error is a consequence rather than a cause.? What causes bad choices?? What circumstances and motivations?? Automation surprise was one of the factors in our industry.
• Resilience – The world is wild and complex.? Understand real work, workers, and environments.? Dissent is vital.? Good adaptability requires actual control - the ability to make decisions and the spare capacity to act.? Pride of work was another important factor.? Breaking rules is an important and positive capability, when the rules are counterproductive.
• Air the Dirty Laundry – Honesty and openness is vital.? Secrecy creates risk and leads to safety theatre.? Integrity is better than perfection.

These are rough notes of a great talk.? Safety isn’t the absence of negative events.? Negative events happen all the time.? Safety is the positive ability to deal with them.? You can see why I liked it.

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12 papers were presented:

Igor from Petrobras talked about the scoring system they used to increase monitoring of risk.? He showed how identification and tracking of faults helped identify problems and helped vessels improve.? E.g. switchboard reliability problems were found to be a result of low control power in the KM RIO modules and another vessel had maintenance problems with oil mist detectors.? He shared three blackout failures, a partial blackout turned into a total blackout by closing the bus tie, an AVR fault taking out a closed bus system, and a cooling problem taking out the engines.

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Richard from IMCA talked about annual trials in a discussion of good practice with concerning counterexamples.? M190 was updated to resolve problems created by commercial pressures.? Examples included a single point failure classified as a C finding and a bid document that promised no A findings.? I previously took issue with some of the complications listed in the M190 result classification and emphasized safe function over compliance, but I agreed with everything Richard said and his examples were about safe function.? We appear in agreement and just expressing things slightly differently.? Good news - DP plot guidance M140 is about to be updated.

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Mark of OneStep Power found problems with management of change to be a common link in some incidents.? He discussed the proper management of change, but noted problems including paperworkitis, vendor exception, poor communication, bad documentation, and lack of post change review.? Often it came down to not understanding knock-on effects or performing detailed risk analysis.? Validation testing is always required.? He gave four examples, one of which was positive.? We have all probably experienced a few examples ourselves.

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Adam of Hornbeck filled in for Bridgette of New Wave Offshore Energy as she had a hurricane to deal with.? The presentation was on the offshore wind use of spare oil and gas vessels.? That was the original plan, but recovery of oil and gas has reduced vessels availability.? Challenges for O&G vessels include the high frequency of operations (quickly hopping from windmill to windmill), high density of things to hit, DGPS interference, different experience and capabilities, lack of support infrastructure, and poor chartering process, so it was about making available assets work.

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Kristian of Kongsberg presented their dynamic cable pull-in system for floating wind farms.? The sealed cable ends are stored underwater and drawn up onto a latched connection on the floating platform for later completion.? All work is done in DP from ROV connection of the pull wire to the motion compensated winch.? The platform has motion and position measurement on it and specialized software controls the winch and follows the motion of the turbine.? Failure of the winch allows completion via DP movement and failure of DP allows safe lowering of the cable by the winch.? I wondered how it would react to a stuck cable, but there is tension monitoring and probably limitation.

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Luca of DNV provided a good overview of walk to work wind service vessel operations.? There is a 10m safety zone to provide pole to ship safety and the ability to keep position when latched on depends on a mixture of vessel capability, walkway capability, and potential attachment points, so the bow can face the weather for best control.? He showed how static analysis was used for initial vessel filtering but then dynamic capability analysis used to ensure vessel position and walkway response capability limits.? He found that fast rotation azimuth thrusters were required (5 rpm).? Someone asked about Voith and he noted that Voith can do that but was most interested in the roll control making certain operations possible.

Lunch:? During the lunch break, Johannes Kr (Bassa) Bj?rings?y received the 2024 Howard Shatto Distinguished Achievement Award from his personal contributions to School for ROCK, international workshops, founding a Norwegian MTS branch, national and international mentoring, and DP aid over the years.? He was humbled to join the select group.? This was followed by workshop report outs.

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Bolshoy of DNV looked at artificial intelligence and its potential impact on DP assurance.? He covered the history and current capabilities of AI.? It has the potential to increase efficiency, optimization, and problem solving.? He may have added save the planet, but that misunderstands how much power this brute force computing uses.? He found AI is advancing and can assist with low criticality work, as it still goes astray.? He looked at pending AI legislation and uses.

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Stuart of Siemens looked at the advantages of DC main switchboard systems and battery systems.? His studies found that both generally improved vessel efficiency.? He claimed that larger vessel power systems were possible with DC than AC, which I didn’t follow the logic for.? He emphasized the power of the very fast solid state bus tie protections and its ability to handle shorts.? AC experts started to get uncomfortable in their seats.? Because I worry about interactions, I later asked him about whether the protections looked at dynamic and interacting voltage control faults like a faulty drive or AVR, or high THD and he told me that there were protections for them.? I forgot to ask about ground fault reference noise.

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Piotr of Global Maritime looked at maintenance management of change (MOC) and asked “what changes are significant and need to trigger MOC evaluation?”? Like Mark, he found impact of changes not understood, not properly classified, and limited in oversight.? He gave several examples such as governors replaced by new models (Mark looked similarly at protection relays) but were not like for like and AVR settings that needed adjusted due to drift.? In each case, he recommended MOC.? I think it would be fair to summarize him as hinting that adjustments to major control functions requires MOC.? I’d follow Mark and say whenever you play with a major function, you should test the results.

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Dariusz of Fugro looked at the history of advances of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS).? As we go from just DGPS to four almost complete satellite systems, the new satellites and different frequencies provide better position fixes and improved immunity from disruption.? He showed some examples of radio and atmospheric interference prevented by using all four.? Spoofing all four satellite networks is more work and he discussed a couple means of protection, such as special integrity analysis which identifies and ignores a terrestrial source. ?He claimed that each of their satellite corrections were independent.? I asked him about recent incidents where this was untrue (last incident) and IMCA warning people about mapping correction sources, and he told me later that sometimes a satellite is temporarily out for maintenance and its signals routed through other satellites, but that the crew should have had an email letting them know that.

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Russ of Furlong Sensing presented his improvement on the SceneScan.? The Unity is a targetless relative position sensor that can still use targets and is a 3D ladar like the SceneScan.? The difference is a higher scan rate, ability to select scanning focus (rather than all round), and a camera to make it clear what is being focused on by the system.? It does not need to keep a point in sight to keep tracking it so long as it is part of a continuous body.? In the future, he thinks that Unity might be used as an absolute position reference as well by having a stored cross-reference between recognized scan sites and their proven DGPS fixes.

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Daniel of Kongsberg looked at using machine learning in station keeping modeling.? This was a mix of real data and dynamic modeling.? Once this was performed, the machine was trained for speed rather than performing the more rigorous and much slower dynamic modeling.? Although some small errors were detected, this allows real time calculation to allow prediction of vessel response to conditions.? The model could then be further trained for increased accuracy of focused criteria.

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Conclusion:? So that’s an overview of what I saw Monday and Tuesday.? I hope it is useful to those who couldn’t make it.