Electrical engineering

Business

Operations research

Offshore wind power

Engineering

Submarine pipeline

Marine engineering

Economics

Microeconomics

Maintenance engineering

Aeronautics

Geotechnical engineering

Reliability engineering

Production (economics)

Crew

Computer science

Wind power

IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Energy

Operations and Maintenance (O&M) constitute a major contributor to offshore wind's cost of energy. Due to the harsh and remote environment in which offshore turbines operate, there has been a growing interest in <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">opportunistic</i> maintenance scheduling for offshore wind farms, wherein grouping maintenance tasks is incentivized at times of opportunity. Our survey of the literature, however, reveals that there is no unified consensus on what constitutes an "opportunity" for offshore maintenance. We therefore propose an opportunistic maintenance scheduling approach which defines an opportunity as either crew-dispatch-based (initiated by a maintenance crew already dispatched to a neighboring turbine), production-based (initiated by projected low production levels), or access-based (initiated by a provisionally open window of turbine access). We formulate the problem as a multi-staged rolling-horizon mixed integer linear program, and propose an iterative solution algorithm to identify the optimal hourly maintenance schedule, which is found to be drastically different, yet substantially better, than those obtained using offshore-agnostic strategies. Extensive numerical experiments on actual wind, wave, and power data demonstrate substantial margins of improvement achieved by our proposed approach, across a wide variety of key O&M metrics.

Seizing Opportunity: Maintenance Optimization in Offshore Wind Farms Considering Accessibility, Production, and Crew Dispatch