Deepwater oil and gas explorations bring more safety and reliability problems for the dynamically positioned vessels. With the demands for the safety of vessel crew and onboard device increasing, the single control architecture of dynamic positioning (DP) system can not guarantee the long-time faultless operation for deeper waters, which calls for much more reliable control architectures, such as the Class 2 and Class 3 system, which can tolerate a single failure of system according to International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) DP classification. The reliability analysis of the main control station of DP Class 3 system is proposed from a general technical prospective. The fault transitions of the triple-redundant DP control system are modeled by Markov process. The effects of variation in component failure rates on the system reliability are investigated. Considering the DP operation involved a human-machine system, the DP operator factors are taken into account, and the human operation error failures together with technical failures are incorporated to the Markov process to predict the reliability of the DP control system.
