COMPASS
The COMPASS model (Combined Operations and Maintenance, People, Assets and Systems Simulation) is an Operation and Maintenance (O&M) simulation tool developed by engineers at ORE Catapult.
A Python-based tool, it is intended primarily for analysing various O&M strategies and comparing them in terms of OPEX, production-based availability and other Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
It takes characteristics of an offshore wind farm, such as number of turbines, cable connection and weather conditions at the site and applies a series of O&M activities. Activities are O&M tasks that occur on turbines, cables and substations that have their personnel and vessel requirements. Each O&M activity can either be planned (i.e. scheduled) or unplanned (i.e. following a failure) and has been assigned a rate.
COMPASS imitates the O&M of a hypothetical wind farm by breaking down its lifetime into time intervals. It then models events with the given rates of turbine failures. It takes into account vessel availability, speed and capacity, weather conditions at the site and spare part availability. The outputs from the tool include energy production losses due to turbine/cable/substation failures, breakdown of O&M costs, wait on weather and usage for each vessel and other KPIs.
Graphs: Figure 1: Vessel usage calculated using COMPASS on a hypothetical wind farm with 40 wind turbines |Figure 2: OPEX breakdown calculated using COMPASS on a hypothetical fixed offshore wind farm
COMPASS can guide the decision-making around O&M strategies for offshore wind farms. Our tool has been benchmarked against two other O&M simulation tools and proved to be effective at modelling various O&M scenarios.
Unlike the existing O&M simulation tools, COMPASS can capture the effects of cable failures considering different cable topology designs. It can model SOVs with daughter crafts and take into account SOV accommodation capacity. The tool can model towing the turbine to port for maintenance and record the tug vessel and quayside usage.
Wide expertise at the ORE Catapult and extensive data analysis have allowed us to form reliable inputs for O&M simulation.