Maintenance strategy selection for improving cost-effectiveness of offshore wind systems

This paper proposes approaches to determine the optimal maintenance schedules for offshore wind system such that maintenance cost is minimized. The proposed approaches aim to provide the optimal maintenance schedules for each component using a dynamic approach and for multiple components by proposing an algorithm to optimize grouping multiple maintenance schedules. To increase the accuracy of estimating the maintenance cost in the proposed approaches, a number of impacted parameters such as system reliability, cost effective, weather condition, maintenance duration, power generation loss during maintenance, market electricity price and offshore wind system location are all considered. Firstly, a dynamic maintenance strategy is proposed to determine an optimal individual maintenance schedule for each component in an offshore wind turbine, in which the failure rate and maintenance cost are critical parameters for the cost model. Then, a grouping maintenance optimization strategy is proposed to determine the grouping maintenance schedule which groups multiple maintenance activities to a grouping maintenance activity. The results indicate that the proposed individual maintenance schedule and grouping maintenance schedule may save an average of 2.33% and 4.56% on maintenance cost over baseline maintenance schedule.