Investigating the impact of disruptive events on the fabrication and installation processes for a floating offshore wind farm

In this study, we investigate how the interruptions and non-deterministic operational behavior at the base port affect the installation time and resource utilization. Scenarios such as equipment breakdown are examples of interruption occurrences. The work provides a detailed study of realistic port tasks and scenarios. The operations at the base port and those between the port and the offshore site include fabrication, assembly, load-out, ballasting tasks of the floater, turbine assembly, integrated floater-turbine towing, and hook-up operations. The reference floating substructure, adopted in this study, is an innovative submersible platform concept, developed by CENER for the INNWIND 10MW wind turbine. SimPy, an open-source Python-based package is used to model critical port and installation procedure operations using Discrete Event Simulation. The results are obtained for a range of disruption frequency from 0.0005 to 0.01 ( ℎ𝑟−1) and repair times of 8 and 16 (hrs). Results showed an increase in the installation time when disruption frequency and repair time increased. The predicted delay in the installation operations was significant in case of higher disruption frequencies and could reach 21%, compared to the reference case without any failure. Moreover, the utilization of fabrication machines decreased by increasing the disruption rate and repair time. For example, the utilization of welding machines for pontoons fabrication was reduced by 19% for a high disruption frequency of 0.01 (ℎ𝑟−1), compared to the reference case.