Fuel efficiency improvement by optimal scheduling of diesel generators using PSO in offshore support vessel with DC power system architecture

This paper presents optimal generation scheduling for minimization of fuel consumption (FC) in a typical offshore support vessel with DC power system architecture employing four identical diesel generator (DG) sets. FC is analyzed for (i) equal load sharing among DGs in AC architecture, (ii) equal load sharing among DGs in DC architecture and (iii) optimal load sharing among DGs in DC architecture using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). Due to the presence of non-linearity in Specific FC (SFC) curves of the diesel engines, the PSO algorithm is used. The SFC-vs-load relationship obtained from Brake SFC (BSFC) map of the diesel engines is characterized using a Piecewise Cubic Hermite Interpolating Polynomial (PCHIP) interpolation. A solution to problem has been attained by comparing yearly fuel consumption in the three cases for the load profile of target vessel. This method can be applied to any vessel equipped with multiple generation units having DC power system architecture.