A Cascading Online-Simulation Framework to Optimize Installation Cycles for Offshore Wind Farms

Offshore wind energy constitutes a promising technology to achieve the world's need for sustainable energy. However, offshore wind farm installations require sophisticated planning methods due to increasing resource demands and the processes' high dependence on viable weather conditions. Current literature provides several models that either provide strategic or tactical decision support using historical data or operative support using current measurements and forecasts. Unfortunately, models of the first type cannot support the operative level. In contrast, the second type provides decision support using local, short-term optimizations that do not consider these decisions' effect on the overall installation project. This article proposes a cascading online-simulation concept that optimizes local decisions using current data. However, it estimates the effects of each decision using nested simulation and aggregates of historical data. The results show that this approach achieves a good trade-off between the project's duration and cost-inducing delays at comparably low computational costs.