Community-centered wind energy: Developing a digital co-design framework for collaboration and planning
Barber, Sarah; Marykovskiy, Yuriy
- Publisher
- Zenodo
- Language
- en
Abstract
This presentation was held as part of the SSH Energy 2025 event. In the presentation, we introduce the CODEWIND project run at OST and funded by the SFOE, as described here. There is a lack of understanding of the potential environmental, social, and economic benefits of wind energy for local economies in Switzerland, and a lack of standardised tools for different Swiss cantons to use. As a result, local opposition to wind energy projects is high, and they are slow or impossible to develop. This project will develop a digital co-design framework for facilitating collaboration and dialogue on future wind energy developments between local municipalities, government, stakeholders and wind energy experts, with a focus on the potential environmental, social, and economic benefits, in a standardised way that is flexible enough to be applied in different regions of Switzerland. We propose a unique integrated and interdisciplinary social science and engineering digital approach, which combines mathematical co-design theory with stakeholder engagement methods to allow qualitative aspects from stakeholder engagement processes to be included directly in the design phase for the first time. The recently developed mathematical theory of “co-design” is based on category theory, which has proved applicable in solving problems in fields such as mobile robotics and mobility. Co-design theory enables the definition of complex system de-sign problems in a rigorous, yet flexible manner, allowing for multiple levels of abstraction, accounting for both qualitative and quantitative constraints. In a recent paper lead by OST, co-design theory was applied to digital twin architecting for rotor blade monitoring of wind turbines. The design of the measurement system and the accompanying digital twin involved multiple teams developing components of the system that are functionally dependent on each other. A design change in one of the components has ramifications throughout the system, ultimately affecting the system functionality. The resource and functionality constraints were effectively communicated across teams of different technical backgrounds and specialisation. Through this work, we are convinced that co-design theory has a high potential to be expanded to other applications such as wind energy project design, due to its ability to express non-convex constraints, non-differentiable, discontinuous and non-scalarisable objective functions, and work with non-continuous design spaces. This means that it will be possible to include qualitative social factors in the co-design problem and therefore to base decisions directly on the inputs from interviews and stakeholder processes.
Full text
Community-centered wind energy: Developing a digital co-design framework for collaboration and planning Yuriy Marykovskiy and Sarah Barber Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences - Wind Energy Innovation Division 16 June 2025, Zurich CH DBAUG - IBK
2 Current state of wind energy in Switzerland Monotone Co-Design Problems (MCDPs) Preview of wind energy project MCDP Outline: Image source: @Gomez
0 50 100 150 200 250 Operational Approved Approval process Active planning Number of farms / projects Number of wind turbines 3 Wind energy in Switzerland in figures (as of 2025) 0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 Operational Approved Approval process Active planning Capacity [MW]
Swiss wind farms (2025) •Operational •Approved •Approval process
5 CODEWIND •Local opposition to wind energy projects is high, and they are slow or impossible to develop. •Lack of understanding of the potential environmental, social, and economic benefits of wind energy for local economies in Switzerland •Lack of standardised tools for different Swiss cantons to use. •Project goal: develop a digital co-design framework for facilitating collaboration and dialogue on future wind energy developments between local municipalities, government, stakeholders and wind energy experts, with a focus on the potential environmental, social, and economic benefits, in a standardised way that is flexible enough to be applied in different regions of Switzerland. Research partners: Wageningen University and Research, Environmental Policy Group (NL)
6 CODEWIND Research partners: Wageningen University and Research, Environmental Policy Group (NL)
7 The co-design framework allows to: •Define optimisation problems at different levels of abstraction •Compose different problems into a single problem •Find an optimal solution in an algorithmic way for a composite problem MCDP based on applied category theory can express: •non-convex constraints, •non-differentiable, discontinuous and non-scalarisable objective functions, •non-continuous design spaces Co-design as a Monotone Co-Design Problem (MCDP) (Applied Category Theory) We can take account of and model things like concerns and preferences
8 Co-design as a Monotone Co-Design Problem (MCDP) (Applied Category Theory) Andrea Censi. A mathematical theory of co-design. Technical Report, Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, MIT, September 2016 What makes system design problems nontrivial is that the constraints might be recursive
9 Co-design as a Monotone Co-Design Problem (MCDP) (Applied Category Theory) Andrea Censi. A mathematical theory of co-design. Technical Report, Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, MIT, September 2016
16 Summary •The co-design framework allows to take account of and model things like concerns and preferences from interviews •We therefore hope to be able to use it to consider the inputs of local communities during the wind farm planning phase dynamically (in real-time during stakeholder workshops)
17 CODE WIND co-design problem (High level abstraction)
18 CODE WIND co-design problem (Mid level abstraction) Discussed tomorrow!
19 Join the workshop tomorrow! Contact yuriy.marykov[email protected] or [email protected]h Thank you for your attention!
