TOPSIS methodology applied to floating offshore wind to rank platform designs for the Scotwind sites

Floating offshore wind turbines are perceived as a techno-economically attractive solution due to their huge potential, however, their Levelised Cost of Energy (LCoE) has the potential to be further reduced, making it more competitive with current technology. The Multidisciplinary Design, Analysis, and Optimisation (MDAO) method is considered a promising way to reduce LCoE. The substructure is expected to accounts for around 35% of the capital cost hence optimisation frameworks have been applied to this area in numerous studies. A difficulty with this method is creating a flexible and robust framework which can model all platform types (i.e., waterplane, ballast, and mooring stabilised configurations), which, simultaneously, remains computationally affordable. In this work, a concept selection method to rank the platform types based on their suitability for a given site is provided. The approach allows a reduction of the design space for an MDAO approach, creating substantial computational time savings. The Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) is a Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) method which is used in this work to rank the platform types in order of relevance for a given site. This technique allows a decision to be made when there are conflicting parameters such as cost and performance. The parameters are prescribed a weighting value by the user, representing the importance based on their specific point of view. In order to determine which platform is appropriate for a specific site, a number of criteria were set related to the site’s water depth, tidal range, soil condition, and wave height. This determines which platform is most suitable based on the physical parameters related to the site. The ranking can be found by combining the weighting of each parameter, the criteria related to the site, and the physical characteristics of each site. In order to support our proposed method, a case study considering the recent Scotwind lease is performed, showing that the derived best solutions are largely in agreement with the platform types considered by the developers.