Title: Categorisation of the offshore wind production system

Authors: Jon Lerche; Hasse Neve; Søren Wandahl; Allan Gross

Addresses: Department of Business Development, Aarhus University, Denmark ' Department of Engineering, Aarhus University, Denmark ' Department of Engineering, Aarhus University, Denmark ' Department of Business Development, Aarhus University, Denmark

Abstract: This paper investigates and describes the production system characteristics for offshore wind turbine assembly and compares it to manufacturing and construction. It requires understanding of the organisations, products and processes to categorise the production system for offshore wind farm assembly. This study compares explorative cases with literature describing the production system characteristics from production and manufacturing domains. The categorisation is completed by comparing product-process first and then product-organisation. To understand the identified differences, the results are displayed in matrixes with manufacturing and construction characteristics from the literature, compared with field notes, observations and archived data from wind turbine assembly cases. The results show offshore wind turbine assembly as a hybrid production system in this comparative study. The comparison contributes to the novel understanding of the wind industry and is theory building within operations research. It establishes a baseline for further operational research within the offshore wind domain.

Keywords: construction; comparison; lean; offshore wind; operations management; production system theory.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2022.122338

International Journal of Operational Research, 2022 Vol.43 No.3, pp.299 - 317

Received: 18 Sep 2018
Accepted: 24 Jun 2019
Published online: 20 Apr 2022 *

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