An opportunistic joint maintenance strategy for two offshore wind farms

Abstract

The expansion of offshore wind farms into deeper waters presents economic challenges due to the rising costs of operation and maintenance. To address this issue, the development of targeted opportunistic maintenance strategies for offshore wind farms is crucial. Existing strategies often overlook the interconnections between maintenance activities across wind farms, focusing solely on individual wind farms. However, joint maintenance of wind farms has been acknowledged as an effective approach to reducing maintenance costs at the operational level. This paper introduces an opportunistic maintenance strategy that considers the joint maintenance of two wind farms and establishes reliability thresholds to guide maintenance decisions. Furthermore, the developed maintenance model is improved by incorporating more realistic vessel models and considering various types of maintenance costs. Conclusions can be drawn from a comprehensive analysis of optimization results across multiple scenarios involving maintenance costs, wind farm parameters, and uncertainties. The comparative analysis demonstrates that, in the farthest offshore distance case, the proposed strategy exhibits a reduction in maintenance costs of 15.67% and 4.87% when compared to two traditional strategies, respectively. This effect is further amplified in scenarios where offshore wind farms are located in close proximity to each other and encounter substantial uncertainties.