Optimizing maintenance plans of offshore wind farms by calculating the likelihood of future turbine failures
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UN sustainability goal 7 is within reach if wind capacity is tripled from 2021, to 2030. Although offshore winds show high energy potentials, costs of operation and maintenance bothers investors. Different strategies are introduced in the literature to minimize the costs
of maintenance and operations. A mixed integer optimization model is developed in this Master’s Thesis. The model finds the optimal maintenance plan for an offshore wind farm, by tracking the age of each component. We perform numerical case studies to explored the
benefit of implementing an imperfect preventive maintenance strategy. Results show that using a imperfect maintenance strategy, as opposed to a preventive replacement strategy is preferable in most scenarios. Additionally, a heuristic algorithm introduced and compared
to the deterministic model. Small obtained optimality gaps from the heuristic algorithm shows good potential for further development. A benefit from the heuristic algorithm is that larger offshore wind farms can be models.
