Holistic opportunistic maintenance scheduling and routing for offshore wind farms

Guojin Si, Tangbin Xia, Nagi Gebraeel, Dong Wang, Ershun Pan and Lifeng Xi

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 2025, vol. 207, issue C

Abstract: Despite the high growth of the offshore wind market, the economic benefits of wind energy sources are still being undermined by its high operation and maintenance expenses. On the one hand, high maintenance expenses are a direct result of offshore-specific challenges such as complex ocean meteorology, varying vessel accessibility, and shifting transportation requirements. Besides, component degradation and weather conditions largely limit the ability of turbine operators to estimate a workable maintenance time window. This study aims to develop a holistic opportunistic maintenance strategy to address the practical challenges of offshore wind farms. The proposed strategy starts by deriving the preventive maintenance interval of each turbine component based on its degradation trend and predictable cost rates. Then, each turbine is maintained in groups based on the maintenance opportunities arising from preventive maintenance, unexpected failures, and cable damage. Following that, given weather condition forecasts of key parameters (wind speed and wave height), the proposed strategy optimizes the daily allocations and vessel routes to maintain turbines in a timely and cost-effective manner. Finally, experimental results based on real-world data from an actual offshore wind farm demonstrate that the proposed strategy outperforms several universal maintenance strategies in key metrics. Compared to the simple, widely employed, and easy-to-implement strategies, it can help reduce the total cost by 85.9 %, 65.9 %, and 41.6 %, respectively. This work helps turbine operators implement comprehensive and cost-effective maintenance schemes, which can lead to tariff duction and wind farm promotion benefits in the long term.

Keywords: Opportunistic maintenance; Delivery and pickup; Service logistics; Offshore wind farm; Operation and maintenance; Cost savings (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032124007172
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:rensus:v:207:y:2025:i:c:s1364032124007172

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/600126/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 600126/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.rser.2024.114991

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews is currently edited by L. Kazmerski

More articles in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().