In the offshore and onshore wind industry, planning activities and overseeing assets are vital in securing optimal and life-long sustainable power production from wind farms. Therefore, planners and operators are constantly looking to implement new, innovative planning and assessment methods that can assist in reducing downtime and costs.
As highlighted in a study from Accenture and The Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult, many issues related to performing intelligent planning in the wind industry, (particularly for the Operations & Maintenance phase), are closely related to their digital application landscape. The study identified a few key challenges of wind operators when extracting value from their data management processes.
- Connectivity
Breaks in the connectivity between wind farms and the operations centre with quality data - Data access
Lack of clarity on data rights, and an inability to obtain data from OEMs - Data volume
Overwhelming volumes of data leading to an inability to generate meaningful insights - Value clarity
Lack of awareness of the benefits of digital, and the improper use of tools
The challenges above tell us that wind operators, often have difficulty in integrating the applications of an enterprise-level when managing data insight on elements such as assets, weather, vessel, personnel and more. More importantly, there are often difficulties with harnessing the potential value of these data inputs to create efficient planning, scenarios and estimates on valid data foundations.
The Shoreline Execution™ solution can bring all the data together into a single platform and offer a user-friendly overview of all asset-related data. A key enabler in managing a complete overview of wind farm projects and their related activities is through our work order management feature, which offers a great way to bring clarity, access, and connectivity to your wind farm applications.
Work order management is an integral part of wind farm asset management
It can be argued that work orders form the foundation of our enterprise asset management platform, as they are an integral part of enabling automated planning. As a planner, it provides you with a rational plan taking all basic tasks into consideration, giving the planner a trusted and resourceful tool.
Work orders can be described as assignments for single tasks and every work order relates to a specific asset. An asset is a technical unit consisting of subassemblies, which in turn consist of components. They are assembled separately but designed to match with other units eventually forming a final product, such as a WTG.
The work orders can also be gathered into groups, which are defined as work packages. Work packages group together all assets and work orders for a specific task. That means as a planner, you can quickly find all relevant information about this activity in one central place. For instance, if the work package is centred around building foundations, then this work package will refer to information such as resources, personnel, assets etc.
All these inputs for work orders, work order packages, assets, subassemblies, components, vessels, ports and much more, can all easily be managed and imported into the Shoreline Wind platform.
One of the most important aspects of work orders for our users is that they can track detailed information from the field. By feeding historic data on each asset and subassembly into the system, you can start making important decisions based on a proven data set. The data can assist in determining whether maintenance of an asset, or a replacement is required and if there are specific areas of a wind farm that seems to be more exposed to damage than others.
All of this is key in making smart decisions for operations and maintenance activities as work orders can give valuable root cause analysis insights for downtime.
Execution empowers enterprise wind farm planning and work scheduling
The purpose of Execution™ is not just for managing data inputs or work order overviews, but also on creating ongoing optimisation.
This happens through our Schedule Optimisation feature, which searches for an optimal execution of tasks to minimise downtime, maximise revenue or any other business value. The schedule optimiser will run numerous scenarios for a period of time, to find which combination of drop off, pick up, and work will produce the most optimal outcome and propose that to the user.
You can read more on the algorithm behind Schedule Optimization™ here: https://www.shoreline.no/news-events/news/ai-planning-for-the-offshore-and-onshore-wind-projects-is-here-and-its-called-schedule-optimisation/
More importantly, this empowers wind operators and planners to easily assign schedules to personnel and transports based on valid data in the defined work orders in combination with smart integrations such as weather forecasting. By gathering all of this into a single interface, planners are able to speed up routine tasks and reduce errors, as well as meet more project deadlines by understanding bottlenecks and utilising assets to their fullest.
Users of the Shoreline Execution™ platform will also have the functionality to create and compare multiple draft schedules within a matter of minutes, enabling a high level of efficiency when testing various resources and comparing profitability, utilisation and more.
For more information on Shoreline Wind’s Execution™ platform, please visit our product page here: https://www.shoreline.no/solutions/execution/
