Availability analysis and maintainability optimization of an offshore wind farm using high-level Petri nets

When evaluating wind turbines, their availability as well as the operational costs are very important parameters. One factor to achieve high availabilities is the maintenance, which is defined in the maintenance strategy. Within this paper, the availability, costs and other operational parameters are analysed to identify the optimal maintenance strategy of an offshore wind farm. The analysis is carried out based on close-to-reality modelling using high-level Petri nets. Petri nets allow the consideration of many aspects of the operation of wind farms, e.g. the joint use of maintenance capacities as well as aspects of spare parts logistics or weather aspects. Different maintenance strategies and concepts of storage are examined, whereby the strategy with corrective and preventive measures can be recommended based on the analysis results. Finally, it is shown, how the statistical uncertainty of the input data can be considered, so that the expressiveness of the analysis results can be increased.