A benders decomposition approach for solving the offshore wind farm installation planning at the North Sea

Wind farm installation and particularly offshore wind farm installation is highly complex due to high dependency on weather and remarkably large components. Amongst others projects at North Sea face considerable interruptions due to severe weather conditions. The problem we refer to consists of determining the renting period of the offshore installation vessels and the scheduling of the operations for building the wind farm. Planners need to make these decisions under the uncertain wind states. A deterministic offshore wind turbine installation model is not suitable to capture the uncertainties which may leave the vessel resource unused or vessel being sent offshore in unfavorable conditions. Accordingly, this study proposes a model that considers disruptions arising from uncertain weather conditions which stand as the main challenge for such projects. As the compact formulation fails to provide solutions due to the large number of scenarios, an approach based on Benders decomposition is developed. The tool is applied to two major wind farm projects, "Bard 1" and "Borkum West" at the North Sea using real weather data over two years. The two-stage model leans to conservatively use the suitable conditions in advance to avoid huge waiting costs incurred under severe weather. Motivated by experts at Wagenborg and MPI Offshore, we extend our experiments to analyze cases where plants are build further away from the shore. The tool presented in this study is suitable for being used in the planning of wind farm projects providing competent solutions. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.