Heuristic Optimisation and Simulation as Decision Support for Operation and Maintenance of Offshore Wind Farms

The rise of offshore wind energy production poses a complex resource allocation problem with respect to operation and maintenance (O&M) of offshore wind farms: O&M tasks need be performed by teams of specialists, subject to limited availability of qualifications, means of transport and appropriate weather conditions. Among others, NP-complete problems like shortest return routing (“Travelling Salesman”) and job scheduling are embedded into the challenge of determining O&M schedules, which in real-world wind farm operation is often still conducted by hand. In this work, we address this problem by proposing a heuristic approach based on a “compatibility rating”, attempting to anticipatorily allocate tasks to teams such that the remaining tasks not yet allocated can still be conducted efficiently, e.g. by a different team. This means of decision support relies on simulation to evaluate the feasibility of the schedules generated.

@InProceedings\{MJG17,
  author       = "Mostajeran, Fariba and Joschko, Philip and Göbel,  Johannes",
  title        = "Heuristic Optimisation and Simulation as Decision Support for Operation and Maintenance of Offshore Wind Farms",
  booktitle    = "Proceedings of the International Conference on Harbour, Maritime \& Multimodal Logistic Modelling and Simulation, organized within the International Mediterranean and Latin American Modelling Multi-Conference",
  year         = "2017",
  url          = "http://basilic.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/Publications/2017/MJG17"
}