Vessel selection guideline for the installation of offshore wind farms

Weather uncertainties during offshore wind farm installations cause difficulties in vessel type selection in the planning phase. Therefore, the development of a general guideline to determine appropriate vessel requirements in the early stage of project planning is desired. A possible approach to develop such a guideline is a statistical analysis. That is why the main objective of this paper is the investigation of the statistical contingency between on-site weather conditions and required vessel restrictions for offshore wind farm installation processes. A method to generalise the choice of the necessary vessels considering its weather restrictions is presented. An optimisation algorithm is developed, based on the existing Fraunhofer IWES COAST tool. The algorithm analyses the dependency of the optimised vessel’s weather restriction on the expected weather conditions at the installation site under varying on-site conditions. As a result, a functional relation between the expected weather conditions and the required minimal vessel weather restrictions is found. The identified relationship provides a rapid assessment of required vessel operational limits given the expected on-site weather conditions.