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Airborne Wind Energy Systems (AWES) convert wind power into electricity with an autonomous tethered aircraft, or kite. The term "airborne" refers to the absence of a static structure to support the energy-harvesting element. Rather, an active control system stabilizes a periodic trajectory in the air in order to produce power. This implies low use of energy-intensive materials and simple construction and installation, obtaining low capital cost and environmental impact. A potentially game-changing solution, AWE is attracting the attention of public and private stakeholders. It has been estimated that, in the EU, 100% of electricity demand could be supplied by AWES exploiting 1% of land, and a recent sector study predicts that, with enough public support to research and commercialization, by the early 2030s AWES could reach an average price competitive with other established technologies, at the same time widening the amount of locations where renewable generation could be economically viable. However, while for inland systems the development stage is rather advanced, the same cannot be said for the offshore application: to date, there is no comprehensive study on the design, modeling, control and optimization of deep offshore AWES. On the other hand, this is the most appealing technology, with the promise to harvest electricity from a vast resource at competitive cost and with high social acceptance. The challenges are huge, due to the complexity arising from the interactions of waves, mooring system, platform, surface station, tether, kite, and automation system, leading to many open questions and exposing significant gaps in our scientific knowledge. Addressing these challenges calls for a synergetic, multidisciplinary research effort that no single group can handle. Through the collaboration of two research units with deep expertise in offshore engineering and airborne wind energy, this project will fill the said gaps, by delivering a rigorous methodology and an open toolchain for design optimization of deep offshore AWES. In the process, the team will research and develop novel approaches to model and simulate interacting phenomena at very different time-scales, to design hybrid, hierarchical and distributed nonlinear control systems, and to globally solve complex design optimization problems with high search-space dimension. The resulting methods, models, and software tools will be a world first, with positive impact for the scientific community, industry, and society. Moreover, through two case studies, the project will deliver a new assessment of the energy generation performance (annual yield, availability, capacity factor, etc.) of deep offshore AWES: substantiated by the rigorous modeling approach, such an assessment will be more realistic than the current ones and either confirm the effectiveness of the technology, or highlight potential bottlenecks, in either case providing a significant added value to all stakeholders.