This paper investigates the logistics capabilities of offshore wind ports, namely physical characteristics, connectivity and layout of the port, for supporting the installation and operation and maintenance phases of offshore wind projects. The relative significance of these criteria is determined using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). The AHP methodology is then applied in a case study as a decision-making tool to enable decision makers to assess the suitability of a number of ports for an offshore wind farm located off the North Sea coast of the United Kingdom (UK).

Offshore wind energy is recognized as an important source of renewable energy and has experienced a rapid growth in recent years especially in northwestern European countries. In this paper the efficiency of 71 offshore wind farms across five northwestern European countries is assessed using the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) Method. The number of turbines, cost, distance to shore, and area of the wind farms are selected as the inputs and the connectivity to population centres, the produced electricity and the water depth are considered as the outputs. The results show that the average CCR efficiency score of all offshore wind farms considered in this study is 87%, and the relative median efficiency of offshore wind farms in different countries is not statistically different. This study offers a practical and holistic performance assessment to the offshore wind stakeholders and policy makers via including economic, environmental, technical and social inputs and outputs in the analysis.

This paper proposes a combined model for port selection and supply chain optimisation for the installation phase of an offshore wind farm. Two strategic models are proposed where the first model, based on Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), aims to select the most suitable installation port. The second model is developed using Integer Linear Programming (ILP) in order to determine the optimal transportation schedule of the components from suppliers to the chosen installation port. The proposed models are evaluated for the West Gabbard (UK) offshore wind farm located in southern part of the North Sea. According to the computational results, the AHP model chooses port of Oostende, Belgium as the most suitable installation port for this offshore wind farm whereas the proposed supply chain model shows that the total transportation cost makes up 9% of total supply chain cost.

This paper investigates a port layout problem, where the layout of an installation port for an offshore wind farm needs to be generated in an efficient way so as to minimise the transportation cost of main components of an offshore wind turbine within the port. Two mixed integer linear programming (MILP) models are established to configure the optimal port layout, where the shapes of subareas that need to be located in the port are rectangular with several possible dimensional configurations to select from and the shape of the port area can be treated as either a convex or a concave polygon. The MILPs can be solved to optimality for small-sized problems. Matheuristic approaches based on Variable Neighbourhood Search (VNS) and an exact method (MILP) are also proposed to find solutions for medium-sized problems. The methods are assessed using randomly generated data sets. In addition, the area of a proposed Scottish port is used as a case study. The results obtained from the computational experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed matheuristic approaches.

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