Led by market leader Siemens Gamesa, drawing on best-in-class partners covering the full value chain of offshore wind energy, i4Offshore will demonstrate the break-down of cost-barriers of large-scale offshore developments. At a commercial, challenging, farshore, deepwater Vattenfall site, a highly innovative offshore system solution featuring a Siemens Gamesa next-generation direct drive wind turbine, a hybrid-material gravity jacket foundation that is optimised for low cost manufacturing, and new very-low-cost array cable-in-pipe solution will be installed and operated as a full size demonstrator during the project. The project is much more than a technology demonstration. i4Offshore combines the technological advances with deep but targeted study of holistic concepts for leaner manufacturing, onshore and offshore transport of components for full scale operation, innovative strategies for operation and maintenance as well as for offshore logistics and installation. The mitigation of bottlenecks in the value chain will be given special attention. Reduction of cost is the paramount concern across all stages of the offshore wind manufacturing, construction, installation, operation, maintenance and decommissioning process, whilst safeguarding the highest standards of health, safety and ennvironment. Enabled by the innovative concepts for manufacturing, logistics, installation, and O&M, validated data from the installed and operated wind turbine system will validate the commercial viability of implementing GW-sized offfshore wind farm consisting of the i4Offshore field-proven solution. The new offshore solution will consist of new, modularized components which allow leaner, faster, more reliable and much more cost-efficient logistics in the transportation, handling, installation and O&M phases of future commercial project development. i4Offshore will deliver innovative, reliable and robust solutions to reducing LCoE to 80€/MWh at highly challenging sites before 2025.

The overall concept of MANTIS is to provide a proactive maintenance service platform architecture based on Cyber Physical Systems that allows to estimate future performance, to predict and prevent imminent failures and to schedule proactive maintenance. Maintenance is no longer a necessary evil that costs what it costs, but an important function that creates additional value in the business process as well as new business models with a stronger service orientation. Physical systems (e.g. industrial machines, vehicles, renewable energy assets) and the environment they operate in, are monitored continuously by a broad and diverse range of intelligent sensors, resulting in massive amounts of data that characterise the usage history, operational condition, location, movement and other physical properties of those systems. These systems form part of a larger network of heterogeneous and collaborative systems (e.g. vehicle fleets or photovoltaic and windmill parks) connected via robust communication mechanisms able to operate in challenging environments. MANTIS consists of distributed processing chains that efficiently transform raw data into knowledge while minimising the need for bandwidth. Sophisticated distributed sensing and decision making functions are performed at different levels in a collaborative way, ranging from local nodes to locally optimise performance, bandwidth and maintenance; to cloud-based platforms that integrate information from diverse systems and execute distributed processing and analytics algorithms for global decision making. The research addressed in MANTIS will contribute to companies' assets availability, competitiveness, growth and sustainability. Use cases will be the testing ground for the innovative functionalities of the proactive maintenance service platform architecture and for its future exploitation in the industrial world. Results of MANTIS can be utilised directly in several industry areas and different fields of maintenanance.