Ørsted develops unique digital tool for cable layout at offshore wind farms

Ørsted, a global offshore wind farm developer, has used FICO Xpress Optimization to develop a novel digital solution for designing an important part of their wind farms. This has enabled the Danish company, which has 30 wind farms in operation or under construction, to achieve significant savings while reducing overall design time and improving its ability to investigate different scenarios.

In offshore wind farms, the power produced by the turbines is sent via cables to transformer substations, where the power is bundled and sent to shore. Using FICO Xpress Optimizer and working with FICO reseller Artelys, Ørsted developed a tool called OptiArray to optimally design the cable layout connecting the turbines to the substations.

Ørsted reports a number of benefits from using FICO Xpress in its OptiArray tool, including:

• Significant savings, which are applicable across their entire pipeline
• Engineers can look for new ways to drive down cost of electricity by testing many “what-if” scenarios
• The success proved the power of mathematical programming in general and FICO Xpress in particular, encouraging other parts of the business to use the power of optimal decision making.

“What impressed me about the Ørsted case is its development of complex models, given the nature of the optimization problem,” said Sid Dash, research director at Chartis Research, who has written extensively on risk analytics. “Innovations like this will help to make renewables a bigger piece of the global energy supply picture.”

“Ørsted demonstrated innovative mathematical modeling to solve this challenge,” said Steve Hadaway, general manager for FICO in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. “Our Xpress solution is built for innovators like Ørsted that need to crunch through millions of options to find the ideal solution in minutes.”

FICO Xpress Optimization is composed of four core components: FICO Xpress Insight, FICO Xpress Executor, FICO Xpress Solver, and FICO Xpress Workbench. Solving large complex optimization problems can be the difference between success and failure in today’s marketplace. FICO’s deep portfolio of optimization options enables users to easily build, deploy, and use optimization solutions that meet their needs.

Standard capabilities include scalable high-performance solvers and algorithms, flexible modeling environments, rapid application development, comparative scenario analysis and reporting capabilities, for on-premises and cloud installations.