Maintenance strategies play a crucial role in the development and success of wind farm management, as they have a significant impact on the profitability of wind generation. The current maintenance decision-making process focuses mostly on the wind farm owner, while ignoring the benefits from the perspective of maintenance contractor. To bridge this gap, a novel contractor-oriented maintenance strategy is developed for both onshore and offshore wind farms to maximize profits for the maintenance contractor. Compared to the reported works, two main contributions are made. First, it is the first time that the maintenance strategy of a wind farm is designed from the perspective of the maintenance contractor, with emphasis on an accurate profit assessment. For this purpose, by utilizing remaining useful life (RUL) information from monitorable and non-monitorable components, a degradation-related efficiency model is constructed to quantify the loss of turbine efficiency due to degraded components and to incorporate it into the maintenance decision-making process. Secondly, various identifiable failure modes of the turbine components are investigated and simulated, as the contractor is more concerned about the maintenance costs under different failure modes. A case study using the dataset collected from real wind farms is provided to demonstrate and validate the proposed maintenance optimization method. The results indicate the proposed method can contribute to the maximum profits of the contractor while satisfying the requirements of the wind farm owner.
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