ABSTRACT
Compared to land-based wind farms, offshore production presents several maintenance challenges. First, offshore wind turbines are significantly larger than their land counterparts are not as easily accessible. This creates the need for nontraditional maintenance resources such as cranes attached to vessels, helicopters and dedicated crews (Haddad et al. 2010) Furthermore, corrosion is a much greater risk due to the humidity and salinity of the sea or ocean. Secondly, the sea itself imposes constraints due to wave and wind conditions which can render the farm inaccessible for significant periods of time. For these reasons realistic, condition-based maintenance optimization models that take into account the unique features of offshore wind farms in order to help reduce cost and make this sustainable form of energy even more attractive. Therefore, in this paper we propose a new condition-based maintenance and operation optimization model for the entire offshore wind farm that takes into account the aforementioned challenges in order to give managers a clear and robust policy to implement.
