Tailoring the particle swarm optimization algorithm for the design of offshore oil production risers

In offshore oil production activities, risers are employed to connect the wellheads at the sea‐bottom to a floating platform at the sea surface. The design of risers is a very important issue for the petroleum industry; many aspects are involved in the design of such structures, related to safety and cost savings, thus requiring the use of optimization tools. In this context, this work presents studies on the application of the Particle Swarm Optimization method (PSO) to the design of steel catenary risers in a lazy‐wave configuration. The PSO method has shown good efficiency for some applications, but its performance is dependent on the values selected for the parameters of the algorithm. Therefore, this work describes some variants of the method, and presents results of several experiments performed to analyze the behavior of its parameters, trying to improve the performance of the method and tailor it for the application to the design of riser systems. The resulting method and its best set of parameters can then be taken as the default values in an implementation of the PSO method in the in‐house OtimRiser computational tool, oriented to the design of risers, and also incorporating other optimization methods based on evolutionary concepts.