Abstract
In the literature, different authors attribute between 15% to 30% of a wind farm’s costs to logistics during the installation, e.g., for vessels or personnel. Currently, there exist only a few approaches for crew scheduling in the offshore area. However, current approaches only satisfy subsets of the offshore construction area’s specific terms and conditions. This article first presents a literature review to identify different constraints imposed on crew scheduling for offshore installations. Afterward, it presents a new Mixed-Integer Linear Model that satisfies these crew scheduling constraints and couples it with a scheduling approach using a Model Predictive Control scheme to include weather dynamics. The evaluation of this model shows reliable scheduling of persons/teams given weather-dependent operations. Compared to a conventionally assumed full staffing of vessels and the port, the model decreases the required crews by approximately 50%. Moreover, the proposed model shows good runtime behavior, obtaining optimal solutions for realistic scenarios in under an hour.
Highlights
Energies 2021, 14, 6963. https://Wind energy offers an opportunity to satisfy the world’s need for green and sustainable energy
Rippel et al [10] propose an online scheduling approach using Mixed-Integer Linear Programming combined with a Model Predictive Control (MPC) scheme to achieve optimal short-term schedules using current forecasts and weather measurements
The topics of personnel and crew scheduling have a long history of publications, but very few works deal with the offshore area in general, and even less with offshore constructions
Summary
Wind energy offers an opportunity to satisfy the world’s need for green and sustainable energy. Offshore construction sites allow larger farms but render them harder to reach, requiring precise operations planning using weather forecasts and human experience. Besides these planning-related challenges, the installation of offshore wind farms requires highly specialized equipment and certified personnel. Over the last few years, several authors have proposed models for the planning and scheduling of offshore operations to reduce these costs. The majority of these models aim to estimate the project duration or schedule using historical weather data and, provide decision support on the strategic level.
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