Data-driven fast reliability assessment of offshore structures based on real-time sensor data

With the advancement of monitoring technologies for offshore structures, sensor data are becoming increasingly available in real-time. The objective of this paper is to develop fast methods for reliability assessment of offshore structures for the extreme and fatigue failure modes, based on the latest real-time sensor data, assumed to be four months. The continuously updated assessment informs operators on the failure probability over the next few years. Reliability analysis using real-time data is challenging owing to the need to extrapolate the observed data to more severe sea states and across many orders of magnitudes of probabilities, and there is a lack of related studies. Here, the environment comprises the short-term and long-term wave characteristics. Three data-driven reliability approaches are developed for three types of wave sensor data. The first approach applies statistical models to the response when wave data are unavailable. The second relies on Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) when only the wave spectral parameters are known. The third applies the Gaussian-experienced NARX network to predict the response time series when the wave time series are recorded. The proposed approaches are applied to a jack-up platform, and implementation of benchmark reliability analysis is enabled by establishing an emulator trained from dynamic simulations for fast generation of synthetic sensor data. The GPR approach is found to show good extrapolation capabilities and able to provide relatively accurate and robust reliability predictions.