Demand-Driven Supply of Offshore Wind Turbine Components by Cascading Simulation and Optimization

. The installation of offshore wind farms con-stitutes a highly weather-dependent process. Despite this dynamic, practice and research generally assume fixed resupply cycles to deliver components from their production sites to the installation’s base port, resulting in high storage requirements. This article proposes a cascading discrete-event simulation framework combined with offline mathematical optimizations to decide demand-driven on suitable resupply cycle from a pool of routes. This approach combines the advantages of both methods by allowing high flexibility to cope with weather dynamics while reducing the search space to a few optimal alternatives. The evaluation uses two real-world use cases. It demonstrates that selecting cycles based on estimated weather developments reduces the required base port storage capacity. Moreover, in some cases it additionally maintains lower capacity levels after an initial ramp-up phase.