ABSTRACT
Structural damage such as fatigue cracks can cause the deterioration of structural performance during service life. Condition-based maintenance (CBM) methods are developing rapidly in life-cycle management to address the decision-making of fatigue structural maintenance. In this paper, a new CBM method for deriving the optimal maintenance policy is proposed using Model Predictive Control (MPC). MPC is an optimization-based control method for constrained systems. The control actions are decided by solving a nonlinear programming problem with constraints. A fatigue detail of an offshore wind turbine (OWT) structure is applied to demonstrate the proposed method. The results show that the MPC-based method is feasible to obtain low-cost CBM policies for life-cycle maintenance. Furthermore, the performance of MPC-based method is compared with policies obtained by the time-based cyclic repair approach. The comparison study shows that the MPC policies result in lower life-cycle costs in general.
