Opportunistic Maintenance Optimization for Wind Turbine Systems Considering Imperfect Maintenance Actions

Currently corrective maintenance and time-based preventive maintenance strategies are widely used in wind power industry. However, few methods are applied to optimize these strategies. This paper aims to develop opportunistic maintenance approaches for an entire wind farm rather than individual components that most of the existing studies deal with. Furthermore, we consider imperfect actions in the preventive maintenance tasks, which addresses the issue that preventive maintenance do not always return components to the as-good-as-new status in practice. In this paper we propose three opportunistic maintenance optimization models, where the preventive maintenance is considered as perfect, imperfect and two-level action, respectively. Simulation methods are developed to evaluate the costs of proposed opportunistic maintenance policies. Numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the advantage of the proposed opportunistic maintenance methods in reducing the maintenance cost. The two-level action method demonstrates to be the most cost-effective in different cost situations, while the imperfect maintenance policy, which is a simpler method, is a close second. The developed methods are expected to bring immediate benefits to wind power industry.