TY - JOUR
T1 - Offshore infrastructure planning using a vine copula approach for environmental conditions
T2 - an application for replacement maintenance of tidal energy infrastructure
AU - de Nie, Ruben
AU - Leontaris, Georgios
AU - Hoogendoorn, Don
AU - Wolfert, A. R.M.(Rogier)
PY - 2019
Y1 - 2019
N2 - Installation and maintenance operations of offshore assets are impacted by local environmental conditions such as wave height and period, wind speed and current velocity. These parameters are substantially of influence for the asset planning (time and costs) given the uncertainty of operational windows. In this article, a method is proposed to construct realistic time series of the aforementioned dependent conditions using a vine copulas approach. This method makes it possible to obtain a large number of realizations of these conditions at a certain location. It is shown that the operational windows remain persistent with the original limited dataset. Moreover, this method enables the incorporation of environmental uncertainties in the operational planning processes. To illustrate the value of this method, an application regarding replacement maintenance of a tidal energy infrastructure is examined. For this purpose, the maintenance activities are represented as a semi-Markov decision process. For every synthetic environmental time series, the algorithm finds the optimal set of decisions and the corresponding maintenance plans, including replacement costs and revenue losses. It is shown that the proposed method is effective in replacement maintenance decision making, while taking into account the environmental uncertainties.
AB - Installation and maintenance operations of offshore assets are impacted by local environmental conditions such as wave height and period, wind speed and current velocity. These parameters are substantially of influence for the asset planning (time and costs) given the uncertainty of operational windows. In this article, a method is proposed to construct realistic time series of the aforementioned dependent conditions using a vine copulas approach. This method makes it possible to obtain a large number of realizations of these conditions at a certain location. It is shown that the operational windows remain persistent with the original limited dataset. Moreover, this method enables the incorporation of environmental uncertainties in the operational planning processes. To illustrate the value of this method, an application regarding replacement maintenance of a tidal energy infrastructure is examined. For this purpose, the maintenance activities are represented as a semi-Markov decision process. For every synthetic environmental time series, the algorithm finds the optimal set of decisions and the corresponding maintenance plans, including replacement costs and revenue losses. It is shown that the proposed method is effective in replacement maintenance decision making, while taking into account the environmental uncertainties.
KW - environmental time series
KW - Offshore energy infrastructure
KW - probabilistic planning
KW - replacement maintenance
KW - tidal energy converter
KW - uncertain operational windows
KW - vine copulas
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85060671674&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/15732479.2018.1558268
DO - 10.1080/15732479.2018.1558268
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85060671674
SN - 1573-2479
VL - 15
SP - 600
EP - 617
JO - Structure and Infrastructure Engineering
JF - Structure and Infrastructure Engineering
IS - 5
ER -