Optimization of routing and scheduling of vessels to perform maintenance at offshore wind farms

Abstract

This paper studies the problem of finding the optimal routes and schedules for a fleet of vessels that are to perform maintenance tasks at an offshore wind farm. To solve the problem two alternative models are presented: an arc-flow and a path-flow formulation. Both models are tested on instances of varying numbers of vessels and maintenance tasks. The arc-flow model is solved with commercial software using branch-and-bound. The path-flow model is solved heuristically by generating a subset of the possible routes and schedules, but produces close to optimal solutions using a lot less computing time than the exact arc-flow model.