The design of a mooring system is a time consuming task, owing to the large number of design cases,rnsoftware interfaces and changing requirements. Although frequency domain is a faster method, thernbehavior of a turret moored FPSO and the loads applied on mooring system in a certain environment arernmost accurately predicted in the time domain. This does not help in reducing design time. Therefore anrnautomated time domain harmony search based mooring optimization methodology, that uses industryrnstandard software Orcaflex and Ariane7 through a MATLAB interface, has been developed. Harmonyrnsearch is a phenomenon-mimicking algorithm inspired by the improvisation process of musicians. In thernalgorithm, each musician (= decision variable) plays (= generates) a note (= a value) for finding a bestrnharmony (= global optimum) all together. The methodology is applied to design a mooring system for arnlarge turret moored FPSO in deep water and harsh environment as a case study. The objective is tornminimize the load on the turret chain table with feasible solutions that satisfy all the design constraintsrnwithout manual intervention. An optimized solution is found within 5 days and the rate at which differentrnmooring configurations are assessed is in excess of 160 per day. This paper outlines the developed processrnand how it may benefit the industry as an efficient mooring design methodology.
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