Energies (Oct 2021)

A Crew Scheduling Model to Incrementally Optimize Workforce Assignments for Offshore Wind Farm Constructions

  • Daniel Rippel,
  • Fatemeh Abasian Foroushani,
  • Michael Lütjen,
  • Michael Freitag

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/en14216963
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 14, no. 21
p. 6963

Abstract

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In the literature, different authors attribute between 15% to 30% of a wind farm’s costs to logistics during the installation, e.g., for vessels or personnel. Currently, there exist only a few approaches for crew scheduling in the offshore area. However, current approaches only satisfy subsets of the offshore construction area’s specific terms and conditions. This article first presents a literature review to identify different constraints imposed on crew scheduling for offshore installations. Afterward, it presents a new Mixed-Integer Linear Model that satisfies these crew scheduling constraints and couples it with a scheduling approach using a Model Predictive Control scheme to include weather dynamics. The evaluation of this model shows reliable scheduling of persons/teams given weather-dependent operations. Compared to a conventionally assumed full staffing of vessels and the port, the model decreases the required crews by approximately 50%. Moreover, the proposed model shows good runtime behavior, obtaining optimal solutions for realistic scenarios in under an hour.

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