Motion estimation and system identification of a moored buoy via physics-informed neural network

This paper explores the use of physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) to estimate motion and identify system parameters of a moored buoy under three different sea states. PINNs are a deep learning architecture that incorporates physical information to provide an interpretable and physically-meaningful neural network model, making it well-suited for modeling offshore moored structures with high nonlinearity. The moored buoy is modeled as a nonlinear ordinary differential equation (ODE), and the general formulation of PINN for the system of ODEs is established. Two new metrics for motion estimation and system identification are proposed to evaluate the accuracy and efficiency of the implementation of PINN. The results demonstrate that PINN can accurately estimate motion and identify system parameters by choosing appropriate hyperparameters (HPs). This paper also investigates the effects of the number of layers, nodes, and learning rate on motion estimation and system identification to provide a benchmark for selecting optimal HPs. This study finds that hyperparameter optimization can reduce the relative error of identified parameters by up to two thousand times compared to no optimization. Motion estimation prefers large neural networks for all sea states, while at least three layers of neural networks are needed for accurate parameter identification. The paper also provides a look-up table to investigate further implementing PINN on moored floating offshore structures. Proper selection of HPs is crucial as it can incur up to three orders of magnitude PINN loss and exceedingly high identification error. Overall, this study highlights the applicability of PINN in modeling complex offshore structures and provides insights into selecting optimal HPs for accurate and efficient estimation of motion and system parameters.