Decision support for offshore asset construction using expert judgments for supply disruptions risk

Offshore asset construction is a complex and costly process that is subject to various uncertainties within the entire supply chain. Hence, both the construction management optimization and the reduction of deployment expenditures should be supported by automated decision support models which include proper representations of predominant uncertainties. One of these is the supply disruption risk that is often ignored in existing models. Therefore, this article proposes a methodology to properly take this construction risk into account. An algorithm to model this risk was developed and a study was conducted to obtain the required probability distributions of disruption delays using real data and expert judgments for an offshore wind farm construction application. The simulation of a realistic test case with an appropriately modified stochastic simulation tool showed that it is important to consider this risk in order to make optimal decisions for different offshore wind farm construction strategies.