A chance-constrained optimization framework for wind farms to manage fleet-level availability in condition based maintenance and operations

Operations and maintenance (O&M) is a key contributor to wind farm expenditures. To increase competitiveness, wind farm operators are increasingly looking into leveraging real-time sensor data from condition monitoring (CM) systems. CM provides significant insights on evolving asset failure risks for wind turbines. To date, these insights have not been fully leveraged in wind farm O&M due to ad-hoc connections to decision-making. Specifically, CM applications in wind farms have been limited to detection of turbines with imminent failure risks that require immediate replacement. In reality, wind farm maintenance requires a careful proactive orchestration of O&M dependencies across turbines along with multiple sources of uncertainty associated with asset availability, operational and market conditions. This paper proposes a unified condition-based maintenance and operations scheduling approach for wind farms that models uncertainties related to turbine availability, wind power output and market price. The proposed formulation explicitly considers the turbine-to-turbine dependencies in operations and maintenance, such as opportunistic maintenance, to identify the O&M decisions that are optimal for multiple wind farms. The problem is formulated as a chance-constrained stochastic programming model to maximize operational revenue while ensuring high levels of turbine availability and generation. To make the chance constraints tractable, two approximations are proposed with a focus on sample average approximation (SAA) and prominent tail inequalities such as Markov’s inequality and Chernoff bound. Our results on a comprehensive set of experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach provides significant improvements in asset availability, market revenue and maintenance costs in large scale wind farms.