A stochastic model for opportunistic maintenance planning of offshore wind farms

A sound maintenance planning is of crucial importance for wind power farms, and especially for offshore locations. This paper presents a stochastic optimization model for opportunistic service maintenance of offshore wind farms. The model takes advantage of 7 days wind production ensemble forecast and opportunities at corrective maintenance activities in order to perform the service maintenance tasks at the lowest cost. The model is based on a rolling horizon, i.e. the optimization is performed on a daily basis to update the maintenance planning based on the updated production and weather forecasts. An example based on real wind data is used to demonstrate the value of the proposed approach. In this example, it is shown that 32% of the cost for production losses and transportation could be saved.