On April 24, 2025, our BIBA colleague Daniel Rippel successfully completed his his doctorate on the topic “Development of an Online Scheduling Methodology for Decision Support for Offshore Wind Farm Installations under Consideration of Weather Forecast Uncertainties”. The thesis was supervised by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Michael Freitag, University of Bremen and Prof. Dr. oec. Julia Arlinghaus, Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, Fraunhofer IFF. 

In his dissertation, Daniel developed a decision support system for the weather-dependent planning of offshore wind farm construction processes. The method combines model predictive control with mixed-integer optimization and takes into account uncertainties in weather forecasts. This results in predictive-reactive deployment plans for installation ships with high reliability and significant savings potential. The thesis not only makes an innovative contribution to operational planning in the offshore sector, but also provides well-founded estimates for strategic and tactical decisions.