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Improving the installation of offshore wind farms by the use of discrete event simulation

Abstract:

The offshore wind energy development is highly affected by the condition of the weather at sea. Hence, it demands a well-organized planning of the overall process starting from the producers’ sites until the offshore site where the turbines will finally be installed. The planning phase can be supported with the help of Discrete Event Simulation (DES) where weather restrictions, distance matrix, vessel characteristics and assembly scenarios are taken into account. The purpose of this paper is to simulate the overall transport, assembly and installation of the wind turbine components at sea. The analysis is carried out through DES considering both the real historical weather data (wind speed and wave height) and probabilistic approach. Results of the study, applied to the real Offshore Wind Farm (OWF) configuration, are showing a good agreement between the two proposed models. The results point out that the probabilistic approach is highly affected by the semi-random numbers used to model the stochastic behavior of the input variable so that several iterations (200 to 400) are required to reach the convergence of the simulation outputs. We suggest that seasonality of the outputs of both models are preserved, i.e. the variation of the results depending on the variation of the weather along the year. These findings provide a new framework to address risks and uncertainties in OWF installations.