Abstract
The installation of offshore wind farms poses particular challenges due to expensive resources and quickly changing weather conditions. Model-based decision-support systems are required to achieve an efficient installation. In the literature, there exist several models for scheduling offshore operations, which focus on vessels but neglect the influence of resource restrictions at the base port and uncertainties involved with weather predictions. This article proposes a Mixed-Integer Linear Programming model for the scheduling of installation activities, which handles several installation vessels as well as restrictions about available cargo bridges at the port. Additionally, the article explains how this model can be combined with a Model Predictive Control scheme to provide decision support for the scheduling of offshore installation operations. The article presents numerical studies of the effects induced by resource restrictions and of different parametrizations for this approach. Results show that even small planning windows, paired with comparably low computational times, achieve reasonably good results. Moreover, the results show that an increase in vessels comes at diminishing returns concerning the installation efficiency. Therefore, the results indicate that available good-weather windows primarily limit efficiency.
Highlights
Wind energy constitutes one of the most promising technologies to cover the world’s need for sustainable energy
The second set of simulations aim to determine a suitable configuration for the prediction horizon and sampling step size used by the Model Predictive Control (MPC)-based approach
The evaluation of the effects of loading bay restrictions shows a heavy influence of the availability of these bays in combination with the current weather conditions
Summary
Wind energy constitutes one of the most promising technologies to cover the world’s need for sustainable energy. In 2017, wind farms with a capacity of around 52 Gigawatts were constructed worldwide, increasing the total amount of energy produced by wind turbines by approximately 11%. To a total of 539 Gigawatts [1]. As a result of high wind speeds at sea, offshore wind farms can produce large amounts of energy [2,3]. According to the Renewables 2018 Status Report [1], the amount of energy generated by offshore wind farms was exponentially increasing over the last decade.
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