Allseas

About Allseas

Allseas is a Swiss-based offshore contractor that specializes in subsea pipelaying, and offshore heavy-lifting. The company was founded in 1985 by Edward Heerema, and today employs around 4,000 people with operations across the globe. Allseas built and operates the world’s largest ship – Pioneering Spirit. With its one-of-a-kind 48,000 metric ton Topsides Lift System and 20,000 metric ton Jacket Lift System (JLS), the ship has the unprecedented capability to lift and transport entire offshore platforms and their substructure.

The challenge

The Jacket Lift System consists of thousands of sensors and actuators that all need to cooperate in close harmony to ensure a safe and efficient project execution under a wide range of environmental conditions. To coordinate the interaction between these systems, the Control Systems team at Allseas developed and maintains the so-called Overall Control System (OCS) – a C++, QNX and real-time Linux based system, running at 50 Hz, with a code base of over 100,000 lines of code.

This system was developed under high pressure, with several projects already sold and planned before the first line of code was ever written. Due to the complex and pioneering nature of the system, it was vital for the team to be able to quickly try different concepts, and develop concurrently with many developers, both in-house and contracted.

All this hard work came to a head during the commissioning phase, when the different subsystems were brought together for the first time and tested, more than 100 miles off the nearest shoreline. Being in the critical path of the schedule of an entire ship means having the ability to quickly make changes and deploy a new version of the control system is of high importance.

How Incredibuild helped – faster iterations and compute power distribution for smarter operations

To reduce build time, Allseas deployed two Incredibuild farms – one in their head offices for most of the development, and one aboard the vessel, to support the commissioning phase of the Jacket Lift System.

Incredibuild had two major impacts. According Allseas team Lead Infra, Jan Hein de Jong, “On the one hand, it allowed us to have a smooth commissioning phase, where we didn’t waste expensive vessel time on waiting for software to build. On the other hand, and perhaps more importantly, having a short development cycle increases the team’s efficiency.” This was critical because it ” allows us to squeeze even higher performance out of our equipment, resulting in safer and more efficient offshore operations, and more value for Allseas’ clients.”

“Having Incredibuild brought down our build time significantly, from around 25 minutes to less than 5. This had two major effects. On the one hand, it allowed us to have a smooth commissioning phase, where we didn’t waste expensive vessel time on waiting for software to build. On the other hand, and perhaps more importantly, having a short development cycle increases the team’s efficiency. This allows us to squeeze even higher performance out of our equipment, resulting in safer and more efficient offshore operations, and more value for Allseas’ clients.” – Jan Hein de Jong, Team Lead Infra at Allseas.

Bottom line 

Using Incredibuild, Allseas was able to optimize its development during commissioning to ensure the team could be as efficient as possible and cut down on critical vessel time. Dev teams cut down build times from 25 minutes to less than five, and were able to get the most out of existing equipment while enhancing performance and ensuring safer operations.