An opportunistic maintenance strategy for offshore wind turbine system considering optimal maintenance intervals of subsystems

Operation and maintenance (O&M) costs account for a large proportion of the total costs for offshore wind energy. Performing a reasonable maintenance strategy is an effective approach to reduce O&M costs and gain more profits. In this paper, an opportunistic maintenance strategy for offshore wind turbine systems considering maintenance intervals of each subsystem is proposed to minimize the total maintenance cost. First, a Non-homogeneous Continuous-Time Markov Process based state transition model is established to study degradation process of subsystems. The influence of maintenance time schedule on the maintenance cost is studied to obtain the optimal maintenance intervals of each subsystems. Then, an opportunistic maintenance model considering economic dependencies between multiple subsystems is proposed to optimize the maintenance strategy by combining maintenance activities of individual subsystems to a grouping maintenance activity. A numerical example is used to indicate the significant effectiveness of the maintenance model. The result shows that the total maintenance cost of an offshore wind turbine system will be reduced by adopting the opportunistic maintenance strategy when compared with conventional preventive maintenance strategy.