Simulation-based scheduling for offshore wind farm installation using timed petri nets approach

Despite the success in developments of wind energy technology, there remain challenges, for example, in offshore wind energy installation. Due to changeable and unstable offshore weather conditions, it is hard to effectively schedule the installation logistics. In this work, we propose a simulation-based scheduling strategy to help the operators and the project managers, to make the main decisions during the installation to increase efficiency, e.g. how many offshore wind turbines should be loaded onto the installation vessel. The offshore logistic concept is modeled using timed Petri nets (TPN) approach. The timed transitions in the TPN model are assigned with operation times estimated by means of discrete-time Markov chain (DTMC) approach, which uses historical weather data. Besides, operability is introduced in this work as an indicator to evaluate schedules of a certain time period.