Operations management of wind farms integrating multiple impacts of wind conditions and resource constraints

Operations & maintenance management is a cost effective approach to ensuring reliable and safe way to control and maintain wind farms. An essential objective is to improve the revenue level by balancing the increase of power generation and the reduction of operational costs. Despite prominent research advancements in wind farm operations & maintenance, no attempts have successfully integrated diverse impacts of wind conditions and resource constraints into the decision-making process. This paper develops a new framework by incorporating: (1) both positive (maintenance opportunity) and negative (maintenance delay) impacts of wind conditions, and (2) production losses during downtime due to resource constraints. A wind-centered maintenance policy integrating multiple maintenance opportunities is designed. Furthermore, a two-level resource scheduling problem with constraints in both repairmen and maintenance teams is solved using a combination of the Multifit algorithm and a heuristic algorithm. The net revenue is evaluated using the performance-contracting and optimized via the artificial bee colony algorithm. The applicability of the framework is demonstrated by a case study from an onshore wind farm in Ontario. Experimental findings illustrate that: (1) wind-centered opportunistic maintenance can effectively improve system revenue, and (2) the proposed framework shows a better performance when facing resource shortages or maintenance delays.