A Numerical Method for Wind Farm Condition-Based Maintenance Policy Assessment

Abstract

The cost of wind energy is greatly affected by wind farm reliability and maintenance management. In this paper, we focus on condition-based maintenance (CBM) optimization for wind farms considering multiple turbines, while each turbine involves multiple components. In previous studies, economic dependency among multiple turbines and multiple components in a turbine were considered, and a simulation-based method was developed for wind farm CBM policy cost evaluation [1]. The simulation-based method was flexible in modeling various scenarios and factors, but due to its sampling-based nature, there are variations in CBM cost evaluation, and the resulting CBM cost function surface is not quite smooth. This could lead to a challenge in the optimization process and cause local minima or convergence problems. Thus, an accurate numerical method is desired. In this paper, a numerical method is proposed to assess the overall maintenance cost of the CBM policy. Therefore, the optimal maintenance policy corresponding to the minimum maintenance cost is more accurately determined compared to the simulation method.