Planning of Maintenance Resources for the Service of Offshore Wind Turbines by Means of Simulation

Abstract

In the last decade, the erection of offshore wind turbines, especially in the northern sea, has been showing a significant growth and this trend will continue further in the next years. In order to make the offshore wind energy competitive and attractive, the different processes related to the overall life cycle cost of an offshore wind farm have to be optimized. In this context, the cost for operation and maintenance (O&M) is estimated between 15 and 30 % of the total costs generated by offshore wind farms. Thereby, the efficiency of the maintenance processes is a crucial factor to guarantee sustainable energy and improve the reliability and availability of an offshore wind turbine. Indeed, the maintenance activities in the offshore field are a challenging task especially due to the harsh maritime environment which leads to high material stress and low resource utilization. In this paper, we model the maintenance processes of an offshore wind farm by means of a discrete event and agent -based simulation model. The objective is to schedule the maintenance tasks taking into account all real restrictions based on historical data in order to determine important factors and potential operational improvement. As an example, the simulation will be used to determine the optimal number of resources needed to perform maintenance activities by keeping the resource utilization in an acceptable level.