A Systematic Framework for Maintenance Scheduling and Routing for Off-Shore Wind Farms by Minimizing Predictive Production Loss

Maintenance scheduling and vessel routing are critical for the off-shore wind farm to reduce maintenance costs. In this research, a systematic framework that takes the advantage of predictive analysis for off-shore wind farm maintenance optimization is sketched and the optimization results are presented. The proposed framework consists of three different functional modules - the prognostic and diagnostic (P&D) module, the wind power prediction module, and the maintenance optimization module. The P&D module predicts and diagnoses the system failures based on the operational data of the wind turbine and generates the maintenance tasks for execution. The power prediction module predicts the weather conditions and the production of the wind turbine in the next 1-3 days, which will be helpful for maintenance task prioritization and scheduling. The optimization module absorbs information from the previous two modules as input and optimizes the overall maintenance costs. Comparing with the previous research works, this framework optimizes the maintenance cost in a more challenging situation by considering the predicted remaining useful life from the P&D module and also the future weather condition from the wind power prediction module. In the proposed framework, the maintenance scheduling and the vessel routing are optimized collaboratively with the consideration of real-time production loss. The result of the proposed framework is demonstrated on an off-shore wind farm and reduced maintenance cost is reported.