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Mooring chains used to stabilise offshore floating platforms are often subjected to harsh environmental conditions on a daily basis, i.e. high tidal waves, storms, etc. Therefore, the integrity assessment of chain links is vital, and regular inspection is mandatory for offshore structures. The development of chain climbing robots is still in its infancy due to the complicated climbing structure presented by mooring chains. The purpose of this paper is to establish an automated climbing technique for mooring chain inspection.

This paper presents a Cartesian legged tracked-wheel crawler robot developed for mooring chain inspection. The proposed robot addresses the misalignment condition of the mooring chains which is commonly evident in in situ conditions.

The mooring chain link misalignment is investigated mathematically and used as a design parameter for the proposed robot. The robot is validated with laboratory-based climbing experiments.

Chain breaking can lead to vessel drift and serious damage such as riser rupture, production shutdown and hydrocarbon release. Currently, structural health monitoring of chain links is conducted using either remotely operated vehicles which come at a high cost or by manual means which increase the danger to human operators. The robot can be used as a platform to convey equipment, i.e. tools for non-destructive testing/evaluation applications.

This study has upgraded a previously designed magnetic adhesion tracked-wheel mooring chain climbing robot to address the misalignment issues of operational mooring chains. As a result of this study, the idea of an orthogonally placed Cartesian legged-magnetic adhesion tracked wheel robotic platform which can eliminate concerns related to the misaligned mooring chain climbing has been established.

The purpose of this paper is to study how job flexibility influences job satisfaction among Mexican professionals, and focus on the role of key socio-cultural moderators relevant to Mexican society.

The paper explore how this relationship may be more important for women, employees with dependents such as children and elder parents and younger generations of professionals (e.g. Millennials).

The authors find that job flexibility is positively related to job satisfaction. This relationship is stronger for employees without dependents, as well as for younger generations of professionals (e.g. Millennials). Surprisingly, the relationship between job flexibility and job satisfaction does not differ by gender. The findings explain why job flexibility is more conductive to job satisfaction for employees without dependents, who tend to belong to younger generations.

Overall, the findings present important implications for managing job flexibility in Mexico and other Latin American countries, particularly for younger professionals.