abstract = "The wind farm industry has undergone significant
growth in recent years. The cost of operating and
maintaining a wind farm can constitute a large
proportion of its overall lifetime cost. Therefore,
designing an effective maintenance policy is
particularly important and has attracted significant
recent attention. Developing such policies for wind
farms is a complicated and challenging problem, with
several aspects needing to be considered, such as the
dependencies among wind turbine components, the
interdependencies between actions, the priority of
activities, various uncertainties and different
resource constraints. An ideal maintenance policy
should simultaneously decide when to trigger and how to
schedule maintenance activities. This research uses
simulation-based optimisation to construct and obtain
approximately optimal maintenance policies for wind
farms, which can simultaneously determine when to
trigger maintenance and how to schedule maintenance
activities. A discrete-event simulation model is used
to simulate the performance of a maintenance policy
under a given scenario, considering all
interdependencies and uncertainties. Different
optimisation algorithms are used to evolve and obtain
effective maintenance policies.
This research proposes three mechanisms to
automatically generate maintenance policies,
considering single and multi-objective optimisation
problems. These policies close several gaps in existing
studies. The main contributions of this research are as
follows.
1. Three aspects of a maintenance policy are
simultaneously considered: reliability based
triggering, opportunistic maintenance, and
scheduling.
2. Genetic programming is used to automatically
construct open-ended maintenance policies for wind
farms.
3. Considerations of wind conditions and spare parts
inventory are demonstrated.",